Samsung believes that foldables are ready to become a mainstream proposition, as last year saw stellar sales of its Galaxy Z Fold 3 and Galaxy Z Flip 3 phones.
In a new blog post titled ‘The Mainstream Moment for Foldable Smartphones Is Here’, Samsung President & Head of MX Business Dr. TM Roh makes a strong case for bendy blowers.
“Last year, we saw almost 10 million foldable smartphones shipped worldwide,” says Roh. That’s still a small fraction of the 272 million phones Samsung sold in 2021, let alone the entire smartphone market. But the key factor here is growth, with that figure representing a 300% increase from the year before.
Foldables are the fastest growing premium phone sector, and Samsung is comfortably dominating the fledgling foldable market.
Roh goes on to break that 10 million figure down a little further. It seems the Galaxy Z Flip 3 was by far the bigger success of the 2021 foldable crop, representing 70% of those 10 million sales.
We recognised straight away that the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 was going to be big, calling it “a big jump for foldable phones” in our 4-star review. For the first time, Samsung had folded a balanced, reasonably comprehensive smartphone experience into a (just about) sub-£1,000 package.
“Three years ago, Galaxy foldables could be summed up in a single word: radical,” says Koh. However, “what was once a novelty three years ago, is now the preferred choice for millions.”
Suffice to say, there’s a reason Samsung stopped releasing separate Galaxy Note models later in the year. Samsung is going to be pushing its Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Galaxy Z Flip 4 foldables hard when they launch on August 10.
