Samsung's coyness dispute over leadership

Smartphones are the hottest gadgets in the world. But who's the biggest smartphone maker? We don't really know. Samsung, Apple's chief competitor, gives only vague indications of how many it makes, which means industry watchers come up with diverging estimates. Apple Inc. reports its iPhone sales down to the thousands. In the January to March period, it shipped 35,064,000. South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co. may have sold 32 million, 37.5 million or 44.5 million, depending which analyst you believe. The company refuses to say. What's at stake are bragging rights. More accurate sales figures from Samsung would also be useful to competitors and to partners like wireless carriers and retailers. When it reported first-quarter results on Friday, Samsung said only that overall phone shipments were down more than 10 per cent from the fourth quarter, and that smartphone sales were about the same percentage of the company's overall sales as they have been before. Samsung hasn't reported any hard sales figures in a long time, so analysts are applying these vague hints to their own estimates, which in turn are based on vague hints from previous quarters. Jan Dawson, an analyst at Ovum, says the analyst community is split over the interpretation of Samsung's reported "300 per cent" increase in smartphone sales in the third quarter of 2011, over the third quarter of 2010. A 300 per cent increase means a quadrupling, but did Samsung really mean that? Or did sales triple, and they made the common mistake of calling that a "300 per cent increase?"