Samsung Galaxy S9 Suffers Weak Sales In Q2 Despite Aggressive Marketing

A report fresh from South Korea has confirmed the poor performance of Samsung’s Galaxy S9 flagship series in the second quarter. The top-tier devices reportedly underperformed despite Samsung’s aggressive efforts to market the phones to consumers.

This week, South Korean-language news site The Bell published a report about the worrying sales of the Galaxy S9 and S9+ handsets. The site found out through data obtained by market watchers that Samsung only shipped nine million units of the Galaxy S9 and S9+ in the second quarter. The figure is lower than the 10.2 million units sold by the company in the January-March period.

What’s also alarming about the data is that they show how this year’s flagships failed to live up to expectations and exceed the sales recorded by their predecessors. For the combined quarters, the S9 series sold 19.2 million units. Last year, the South Korean tech giant managed to sell 21.2 million units of the Galaxy S8 series in the first two quarters.

According to SamMobile, Samsung’s aggressive marketing didn’t do much to convince consumers to buy its top-end Galaxy handsets this year. And even though Samsung hasn’t released its full earnings report for the second quarter yet, its Q2 earnings guidance is already hinting at the slowdown in the sales of the S9 phones.

This is absolutely bad news for Samsung, since this is the first time that its Q2 sales are lower than its Q1 numbers. It’s also worth noting that the S9 series went on sale in mid-March, so this could explain the low numbers in the first quarter. However, having poor sales in the second quarter just strengthen the idea that the S9 phones failed to meet expectations.

To counter the problem, Samsung has reportedly decided to release the Galaxy Note 9 earlier than its predecessor. Samsung has already sent out invitations for its Unpacked event for the premium phablet on Aug. 9. The device will then go on sale on Aug. 24. For comparison, the Note 8 was unveiled on Aug. 23, 2017 and officially released on Sept. 15, 2017.

In addition, Samsung is also considering merging the Galaxy S Plus and the Note lineups to reduce production costs amid falling profits. Nothing is set in stone for now, but the move will be very beneficial to the company since both the S Plus and the Note series cater to phablet users anyway.