A few days ago, information appeared on the Internet indicating that Samsung would have sold around 2 million Samsung Galaxy Tab tablets since the launch of the device until now. The figure is impressive considering that the iPad tablet sold a little over 7 million copies in the last 3 months, so we could consider the Samsung Galaxy Tab a real success, right? Well no. The 2 million units of the Samsung Galaxy Tab were shipped by Samsung to distributors, but direct sales to customers were much smaller. Those from Samsung did not want to reveals how many tablets did they actually sell, so it's probably about very poor sales.
As you heard, our sell-in was quite aggressive and this first quarterly result was quite, you know, fourth-quarter unit [figure] was around two million. Then, in terms of sell-out, we also believe it was quite small. We believe, as the introduction of a new device, it was necessary to have consumers invest in the device. So therefore, even though sell-out wasn't as fast as we expected, we still believe sell-out was quite OK.
In these conditions, yesterday's article, regarding the fact that Apple would have lost 18% of the market share of tablet PCs in front of Android tablets, is no longer relevant. This does not mean that Apple has not lost part of its market share and this does not mean that Apple should calm down considering that in the coming months a whole series of tablets will be launched on the market that will certainly "wink" ” to those who intend to purchase a tablet in the near future.
UPDATED: We also add to weak sales rate of return of 16% among these tablets. It seems that the Samsung Galaxy Tab is not quite as great as some people thought.
ITG Investment Research tracked point-of-sale data from nearly 6,000 wireless stores in the US from the Galaxy Tab's November debut through Jan. 15 and found the device to have an unusually high return rate. According to its estimates, cumulative return rates for the Galaxy Tab through December of 2010 were about 13 percent. Worse, that percentage is growing as holiday purchases are returned. ITG figures cumulative Galaxy Tab return rates through January 15 were 16 percent. Ugly, considering the return rate for the iPad at Verizon since its debut on the carrier is just 2 percent.
