Samsung has a strange forecast for the cheap Galaxy Z Flip FE unit sales
Samsung will be launching three foldable phones in 2025, just like this year, but this time it will be the clamshell model that will get two versions. Faced with an onslaught of competition from the Chinese brands, Samsung reportedly decided to lower the price entry barrier to its foldable phone portfolio by introducing an even cheaper Z Flip version.
Dubbed tentatively the Galaxy Z Flip FE, the cheapest Samsung foldable is expected to start much lower than the $999 tag of its Z Flip 7 sibling. Both the Z Flip 7 and the Z Fold 7 are expected to be about 10% thinner than their predecessors, the Z Flip 6 and Z Fold 6.
Since Samsung already developed the Z Fold Special Edition, it might as well use it as a base for the Z Fold 7 next year, what with the larger screen and the more elegant body. The Z Flip 7 will also have a bigger display, perhaps achieved by shrinking the bezels, which leaves the Z Flip FE to be something akin to the Z Flip 6, perhaps just with a different processor.
Samsung has been rumored to put MediaTek's flagship Dimensity 9400 in the S25 series to lower their cost compared to using the pricey Snapdragon 8 Elite (Gen 4) chip, but TSMC didn't have enough yield, so it reportedly postponed these plans for its 2025 foldables like the Flip FE.
These savings could very well bring a record low $699 starting price point for a handset in the Flip series, but Samsung obviously intends to only test the waters with such a release. According to The Elec's industry sources, it has given orders to suppliers for only 900,000 Galaxy Z Flip FE units, unlike the three million Z Flip 7 phones it expects to sell, or the two million Z Fold 7 units.
This humble forecast may raise some eyebrows, since the cheapest phones usually sell much more than their more expensive siblings. Samsung, however, could only be testing the waters with the Z Flip FE, trying to gauge if the market will accept a fatter clamshell with perhaps only a processor upgrade, and not a Snapdragon processor at that to keep costs in check.
Still, the Z Flip FE will eventually put it a cool million over the top of the sales achieved with its 2024 foldables, so the effort to make a more affordable bendy phone might pay off in the end. As for the Galaxy S25 series, Samsung expects it to constitute the bulk of its flagship phone sales in 2025, with 37 million units ordered in total, more than its 35 million forecast for the S24 series this year.
In total, it expects to move 229 million phones, quite a bit less than the 237 million units it did forecast in October, but a boost over the 222 million handsets it will sell in 2024, despite the slowdown in foldable phone sales that Samsung will try to overcome with the cheapest Galaxy Z Flip FE.
As for the midrange and budget series, those are the stars in Samsung's 2025 phone sales forecast. For next year, Samsung is reportedly readying to ship no less than 120 million units in the Galaxy A series of midrange and affordable phones. Of those the most sales are expected to go to the Galaxy A16 model, with nearly 50 million units, while the next Galaxy A26 step will ship 10.6 million units, the Galaxy A36 14.2 million units, and, finally, the upper midrange category of Galaxy A56 with no less than 16.5 million units in the sub-$500 segment.
These are all the handsets that will be made by Samsung itself, but it also has JDM models with outsourced production in the low-priced budget line, where the Galaxy A06 is expected to see the most sales with 23.7 million phones. Not a bad plan overall, and Samsung is obviously being conservative for 2025, expecting to see a phone market recovery only in 2026 when it might release a tri-folding phone to battle the foldable iPhone. That is when the Galaxy S26 series will be seeing a thorough redesign, too.
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