Samsung is picking up Apple’s slack. Just a few months after Apple reported the first ever decline in iPhone sales (and at a rather precipitous rate, to boot), Samsung has rallied and filled in the empty space.
On Thursday, Samsung announced its earnings guidance for 2016’s second quarter, noting that operating profit is expected to hit $7 billion, a whopping 17 percent increase from Q2 of 2015. This performance represents Samsung’s strongest profit in over two years, largely due to the popularity of both the new Galaxy S7 and the Galaxy S7 Edge smartphones.
Far from a self-fulfilling prophecy, Samsung seemed to surprise even itself with its earnings — just six months ago, the South Korean tech giant cautioned that 2016 might be a tough year following a lackluster 2015. But clearly, they’ve outdone themselves. And while these results are only preliminary, Samsung has historically done a pretty good job of forecasting its earnings. When final numbers are in at the end of the month, the company will be able to provide further details as to each unit’s performance, and the effect of its smartphones.
Indeed, it would seem that the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge were large factors in Samsung’s positive performance — when we reviewed them back in March, we called them “gorgeous, waterproof,” and noted that they had “better cameras than Samsung [had] ever produced before, and supped-up Snapdragon 820 processors making them ultra-powerful.”
And it would appear that consumers were similarly taken by the smartphones. Despite their high price point which is comparable to Apple’s iPhones, they appear to have sold, well, better.
For its part, the iEmpire is slated to reveal its own Q2 earnings later in July, so we’ll see if there’s competition to be had between the two smartphone giants. Or could it be the case that Samsung is leaving Apple in the dust?
