At its current sales pace, Samsung will have to double foldable sales in 2024 to meet its target
Samsung has set a target and hopes to sell 20 million units of its Galaxy Z foldables in 2024. That would be a 33% gain from the 15 million Galaxy Z foldables that Samsung hopes to ring up this year. What makes this a very tough goal is that the competition in the foldable space has increased sharply, even in the U.S. where the Google Pixel Fold and the just introduced OnePlus Open are battling with the Galaxy Z Fold 5 for supremacy in the book-style foldable category.
In China and some European and Asian markets, the Galaxy Z Fold 5 has to compete with phones like the Honor Magic V2, the Oppo Find N3, the Xiaomi Mix Fold 2, the Huawei Mate X5, and more. And those are just the book-style models. The Galaxy Z Flip 5 battles in the States with the two Razr models from Motorola and overseas there is the Oppo Find N3 Flip, the Vivo X Flip, the Huawei P50 Pocket, and others.
At its current pace, Samsung can expect to sell 10 million units of the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5 combined this year
And despite the competition, Samsung has a heck of a task cut out for it. The 20 million foldable units it hopes to sell next year is the total number of foldables forecast to be sold this year. As we told you yesterday, one way Samsung hopes to improve sales is by making the Galaxy Z Fold 6 slimmer. The Galaxy Z Flip 5 is 13.4mm when closed compared to the 12.1mm and 11.7mm measurements for the Pixel Fold and OnePlus Open respectively.
This year, the big competitive battle was over the size of the external "cover screen." Samsung, heavily criticized for the puny cover screen that used to grace its Flip foldables, increased the size of the display to 3.4 inches which was exceeded only by the Quick View feature on the Motorola Razr+ which features a 3.5-inch external screen that covers the entire rear panel.
Not all of the external displays offer the same capabilities and right now the Razr+ allows users to practically do everything on the external display that they can do on the internal display.
At this stage, it appears that Samsung is going to be able to tally sales of 10 million Galaxy Z units this year which is 33% less than its target. If that's the case, the South Korean manufacturer will have to revise lower its target for next year's foldable sales or face the daunting task of having to double sales to reach the current goal of 20 million units in 2024.
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