According to a new report out of its home of Korea, Samsung has a stock problem. And it’s that it has huge amounts of phones in stock – over 50 million, in fact. That staggering stockpile has added up into the stocks of its distributors. These are phones that are just sitting there waiting to be bought – but apparently not enough people want them.
The A series of mid-range devices allegedly takes up a huge portion of this stuck inventory, presumably because they aren’t appealing enough to fly off the shelves.
Samsung is aiming to ship around 270 million smartphones this year, and 50 million is 18% of that. “Healthy” stock numbers would be at or below 10%, hence why the sources for this report claim there’s a desirability problem for these stockpiled devices.
Samsung made around 20 million units per month early this year, but that dropped to around 10 million in May. This could be a reaction to having too many units stuck in inventory and seeing low demand. The lower demand has also made Samsung cut its component orders from suppliers by 30% to 70% from April to May.
