The Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus are selling twice as fast as the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge in South Korea, the Seoul-based consumer electronics manufacturer revealed on Monday. Its latest pair of premium Android smartphones surpassed one million sales yesterday, 37 days after officially hitting the market. The Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S6 lineups reached the same milestone in 74 and 75 days, respectively, a Samsung official said, implying that the company is expecting to maintain that commercial performance in the coming months. The Galaxy S8 series already broke Samsung’s pre-order record in South Korea, almost doubling the 550,000 pre-orders placed for the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge last year, with many industry watchers expecting both handsets to do extremely well on Samsung’s home turf, which seems to be happening now.
The company’s new flagship lineup also experienced a significant surge in sales on May 1 when Samsung started rolling out Korean voice support for the Bixby artificial intelligence (AI) assistant. The Seoul-based original equipment manufacturer (OEM) said that 160,000 Korean consumers purchased the Galaxy S8 or Galaxy S8 Plus on that day alone. The new pair of high-end phablets already surpassed ten million shipments and five million sales on a global level earlier this month and will likely continue performing in a strong manner in the second half of 2017, at least until Samsung unveils the highly anticipated Galaxy Note 8. The largest phone maker in the world currently enjoys a relatively unique position in the market as it’s one of the few OEMs that are able to utilize commercial performance figures as a viable advertising strategy, some industry watchers say.
Despite reports of some minor technical issues with early models of the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus, both devices have been met with an almost universally positive response from both critics and consumers alike and are expected to outsell all of their Android-powered competitors released over the course of this year. While Samsung’s mobile division already managed to return to the black following last year’s Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, its new flagship lineup is said to drive it to record profits. An update on the commercial performance of the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus will likely be available in the coming weeks.