Normally Samsung does fairly well when it comes to hitting their marks for mobile device sales. However in the fourth quarter of last year, that was all but true as the Korean giant’s earnings report listed them as having fallen a total of 9% from the overall sales they had in the previous quarter. While this doesn’t mean that Samsung is hurting too badly, they do have an opportunity to make up some ground in this first quarter of 2014 and it would be a wise choice to take it. Samsung wasn’t the only one who ended up not meeting projected sales goals though. Nokia had a fairly steep drop off from third to fourth quarter as well.
What does all this mean for us as consumers? Maybe nothing, but it could mean that we’re about to see tons of smartphones go on sale with insanely deep discounts. Samsung has never been one to just sit back and take a back seat to other OEMs, as they naturally strive to be number one. And if they want to stay number one in the sales numbers department, they’ll have to seriously start considering pushing some good deals forward to steal some thunder back from low cost devices like the Moto g. This of course would cause other OEMs to do the same thing, and offer consumers some pretty steep discounts to stay caught up with Samsung and Nokia (now owned by Microsoft), who fell short on sales last year.
Other factors that could cause us to see some upcoming pretty good deals on a new device are the bidding wars that US carriers are making for customers. In its boldest move yet, T-Mobile unveiled its phase four planning of it’s popular Uncarrier plan earlier this month, which is to pay off customers contracts and buy up their old phones, in return for writing a “break up letter” to their old providers and switching carriers. So far the plan seems to have been working well for Big Magenta. The idea here is, that if Verizon, Sprint, and At&t want to keep customers from leaving, or win some back, they’ll have to entice customers with similar offers or low priced phones. At least, that’s seemingly the most logical scenario. Even if only some of these speculations start to fall into place, people are going to start seeing some serious discounts in return for brand and carrier loyalty. If you think about it, discounted phones and phablets isn’t really a bad deal for consumers.
Source: BGR