Korean TV manufacturer Samsung is celebrating a milestone this week, after announcing through a social media news release on its corporate blog site SamsungTomorrow.com that it has sold two million units of Smart TVs worldwide within just three months of the internet-enabled models’ global release. The two millionth set was sold on the 15th of June.
While HDTV offerings from Samsung had featured web connectivity as early as 2009, it was only this year that the Seoul-based consumer electronics giant adopted the “Smart TV” moniker to market its new-for-2011 internet-connected portal dubbed “Smart Hub”. The improved graphical user interface (GUI), the cleverly designed functionalities, and the variety of rich, interactive content were all cited by the company as important factors that contributed to the popularity of Smart TV sets.
According to figures released by Samsung, around 730,000 units of these televisions were sold in North America (the largest TV market in the world), with a further 710,000 sets being snapped up European buyers predominantly in developed countries such as the UK, France, Italy and Germany. The company also said that although Smart TVs have been introduced a little late to emerging markets like the Middle East and Africa (170,000 sets sold) as well as South East Asia (270,000 units), sales were booming in these regions with little sign of any slowdown. 120,000 Smart TV displays were shifted in the corporation’s home country of Korea.
Always keen to impress, Samsung even broke down the sales numbers into more digestible formats. Apparently its 2011 Smart TVs took merely 25 days to reach sales of half a million units following launch in early April; and by the end of April the one million mark was breached. Since then, steady sales at an average rate of 150,000 units per week – or 22,000 per day, 926 per hour, or 15.4 per minute (based on a diagram that accompanies the press release) – eventually led to the crossing of the two million milestone on the 15th of June.
Source: Samsung Tomorrow
