Galaxy S3, Note 2 Tipped to Power Samsung into 63M Year-End Smartphone Sales
The year 2012 could prove the biggest for South Korean tech giant Samsung so far as reports suggested that the Galaxy device maker is well on its way to keep the global smartphone leadership by shipping at least 60 million phones at the close of December.
Korea's Yonhap News Agency has reported last week that Galaxy smartphone shipments worldwide will likely surpass its Q3 2012 unit sales of 58 million, adding by as much five million more to the total handsets that Samsung had pushed out by the end of September 2012.
Citing the figures provided by investment bank UBS, projections are high for Samsung to finish off the year with actual sales of 63 million smartphones, quite enough for the firm to really end the year with a bang.
The UBS forecast, analyst said, places Samsung in a very solid position to prove wrong earlier market expectations that Apple will regain the global smartphone market leadership come the end of the current year on the back of its surging sales figures for the iPhone 5.
The new Apple handset indeed proved a bestseller but it failed to dampen interest on its chief rival handsets that Samsung sells, particularly the Galaxy S3 and the second version of the Galaxy Note.
The S3, according to Strategic Analytics, has eclipsed the iPhone as the bestselling smartphone brand in the world as of September this year while the Note 2 has successfully sustained the momentum gathered by the first Note, which created the new segment phablet or the hybrid gadget that offers both the functions of a smartphone and a tablet computer.
The Note 2 is likely to register Q4 sales of around seven million units while the S3 is poised to attract some 15 million buys in the same period, UBS said on its report, giving Samsung sufficient traction to increase its smartphone market share to 37 per cent in the initial months of 2013.
Once the dominant power in market that it claimed it reinvented, Apple is set to wrap up its 2012 smartphone performance by collecting over 20 per cent of the global smartphone pie, according to ZDNet.
The UBS report came out as Apple listed six more Samsung devices that the company wants to be banned from the U.S. market on its latest court filing, among them consumer magnets Galaxy S3 and its smaller sibling, the S3 Mini.
"Apple has acted quickly and diligently to determine that these newly-released products do infringe many of the same claims already asserted by Apple," Reuters reported the U.S. tech titan as saying its new court plea.
Apple's move, however, could only undue generate interest on Samsung products that were otherwise regarded as lightweights when compared to rivals, analysts said. Samples of these are the tablets Galaxy Tab 8.9 and the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 - two slates that were geared as entry-level products and hardly perceived as threats to Apple's iPad.