Samsung pledges threefold increase in its smartphone sales

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Samsung pledges threefold increase in its smartphone sales

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 5 February, 2010

READ MORE: Samsung | Handset | Android

Nokia's not the only phonemaker getting aggressive this week. After a similarly impressive quarter, when Samsung shipped a record 69m handsets, the Korean firm is determined to close the gap on the market leader this year. It has outlined plans to hit an ambitious target of selling 260m to 270m phones globally this year, which at best would be a leap of almost 19% on 2009.

In 2009, Samsung achieved a 15% increase, from 196.6m in 2008 to 227m, largely relying on increased sales of low end and midrange handsets, plus making strong impact with high end mediaphones like Jet. In 2010, it needs to build on these trends, which have enabled it to top 20% market share for the first time, but also gain strength in open OS smartphones, where Samsung has only about 3% share. If it hit its goals, it would overtake HTC as fourth largest smartphone vendor after Nokia, RIM and Apple, and would gain about 8% share, likely at the expense of all the big three but particularly HTC.

The flagships for this push will be the M100S, to be unveiled at this month's Mobile World Congress, and shortly afterwards, a 1GHz 'Galaxy 2'. Both will run the latest release of Android, 2.1, and go head-to-head with other top end Android handsets like HTC Bravo, Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 and Google Nexus One.

While most of the new breed of 1GHz Android superphones use the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, long time Qualcomm customer Samsung is likely to break faith with Galaxy 2 and use its own ARM-based processor, Hummingbird. Also clocked at 1GHz, this was developed through last year with Intrinsity and represents a new push by Samsung's semiconductor unit to push into the growing area of apps processors for mobile devices. The group's handset unit does not always look kindly on the products of its sister firm, but in Hummingbird's case is reported to be planning at least three devices this year. This is in line with a trend for companies at the top end of the mobile segment to look to inhouse ARM-based silicon to give performance differentiation, especially in multimedia, and help fend off incursions by products based on Intel Atom.

The M100S will also have a 3.7-inch AMOLED screen, 5-megapixel camera with 720p video recording, Wi-Fi, GPS, DivX support, a 3.5mm headphone jack and in its Korean iteration, T-DMB for mobile TV. This variant will ship first, in March, with SK Telekom, and global roll-out should follow from April.

Of course, achieving the huge uptick in shipments that Samsung is targeting will take more than smartphones. The firm also plans sell conventional handsets at twice the rate of the industry overall, while trebling its smartphone shipments from 6m last year to about 18m. However, it is notable that Samsung is including its own software platform, bada, in its smartphone calculations along with the big three open OSs. This does have an open developer program, but only applies to Samsung products.

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