Samsung is taking a big step for…er, backward in the increasingly competitive smartphone race.
The company has announced it will no longer report specific phone sales data. Until now, Samsung repeatedly listed detailed data about how many phones it sold during a given quarter.
Now, however, “As competition intensifies, there are increased risks that the information we provide may adversely affect our own businesses,” Samsung chief of investor relations Robert Yi justified.
The fact that Samsung used to give the general public such specific sales figures was kind of a step in the opposite direction of the company’s usual modus operandi.
But Samsung has done so well in the mobile space thanks to the advent of Android, that it just had to brag about it. For example, in the first quarter of this year, Samsung said it sold 70 million mobile devices, which includes phones and tablets.
That sounds pretty impressive, until you consider that Strategy Analytics’s third-party number crunchers had predicted 74 million unit sales. So as a result, it ended up being something of a low point for Samsung.
By no longer publishing that kind of sales data, the risk of not meeting expectations will not be nearly as high. The same information stoppage will also apply to Samsung’s tablet sales.
So in the end, Samsung is taking a step backward in company transparency, but justifies it as saying it cannot afford the risks involved.
