Hacker News Reader

Comment by weiran | Hacker News Reader

This is bullshit, the "preorders" are from carriers not actual customers. Samsung could sell zero units and still claim to have 9 million preorders.

> Samsung Electronics Co has received some 9 million pre-orders for its third-generation Galaxy S smartphone from more than 100 global carriers, the Korea Economic Daily reported on Friday.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/us-samsung-idUSBRE...

The number of "news" sites just blindly reposting this as if it were actual customers is frankly disgusting.

View on HN

What is your point exactly? I'm pretty certain the carriers do their homework before placing orders. They don't want a ton of inventory just sitting on their shelves. So the carriers expect to sell them and Samsung did sell them (doesn't matter who bought them).

The point is it doesn't matter how many units they sell to Best Buy, what matters is how many units they sell to consumers.

This happens all the time, we hear about X millions of units "shipped" only to find out months later that a small fraction of those actually made it into consumers hands.

Given the incredible popularity of the GS2 among the Android community, I'd say it's not unreasonable to think the GS3 will sell well.

No one is saying it won't sell well. They're saying that reporting carrier orders as "sales pre-orders" lacks an important detail. Thus, some are calling bullshit on the headline.

There might well be a term that says they can return unsold stock.

>>I'm pretty certain the carriers do their homework before placing orders.

The Android manufacturers cited deliveries to stores as sales for the first generation of pads too. That didn't exactly work out...

I remember reading on Reuters that Apple forces carriers to buy a minimum amount of iPhones now when they launch, or I would assume they won't give them the iPhone.

Also, maybe the carriers have done their research and are expecting to sell a lot of them.

carriers base their pre-orders off customer requests, they have been in the handset retailing/reselling business for long enough to understand customer demand and how many they will need on release day.

I know plenty of people hoping to pick one up on release date, quite a few of those are leaving apple too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com