The Apple vs Samsung patent war might be Samsung’s best ad campaign till now

(Cross posting from my blog - posted originally in April 2013)

I’d been saying this many times to many people for a while now so I thought I’d do some research and see if my hunch was correct. I never could shake the feeling that before 2011 (the year when Samsung got sued - April 2011), Samsung was a measly 2nd rung OEM like HTC, Sony, etc. It had no respect of the people in terms of design and it was certainly no ‘market leader’ or ‘trend-setter’.

So after some digging, I found some proof. I admit, it’s circumstantial but unlike Samsung and Apple, I’m not in court so that doesn’t matter! Also, if there’s smoke, there has to be a fire. I basically looked into Samsung’s sales figures for mobile phones from the years 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

I looked up 2009 and 2010 to see how the sales used to increase for Samsung before the hype. I wanted 2011’s figures just to see if the hype affected in the same year itself. And finally, I was hoping to see a big spike in the values of 2012.

Here are the values:

2009: 234 million phones

2010: 280 million phones (19.6% increase)

2011: 300 million phones (a measly 7% increase!! the company was actually failing in 2011! If things were to proceed like this, Samsung would’ve soon lost its no. 2 position as well)

2012: 384 million phones (28% increase!)

For a company whose sales had already plummeted from 19.6 to 7 percent in one year, it is suspicious that its sales suddenly jumped with a 28% increase.

Update (12th May 2014): Now that the war is over, this hunch was proven correct by some other sources as well: (Original link: Regardless of Latest Verdict, Samsung Has Already Won the Battle With Apple)