Samsung's 2024 Folding Phones AI as Selling Point but Shipments Decline

TapTechNews August 13th news, Kuo Ming-chi today released a market investment briefing, believing that the two phones, Galaxy ZFold6 and Galaxy ZFlip6, to be released by Samsung in July 2024, will take Galaxy AI as the main selling point, but the pre-order situation has decreased by 10% year-on-year. It is estimated that the shipment of Samsung's folding screen phones in 2024 will be 8-9 million units, a slight decline compared to last year.

TapTechNews attaches Kuo Ming-chi's briefing information as follows:

Industry Status and Survey Update:

The Samsung S24 series phones, although the initial demand at the launch was better than expected, the shipping momentum has slowed down since April.

Samsung's new folding phones (Galaxy ZFold6 and Galaxy ZFlip6) in July 2024 will also take AI as the main selling point, but the pre-order has decreased by 10% compared to last year. The shipment of Samsung's folding phones this year is about 8-9 million units, a slight decline compared to last year.

It is currently expected that the shipment of the S25 series in 2025 may be the same as that of the S24 series in 2024.

Conclusion:

It is an inevitable trend for mobile phone brands to invest in AI services one after another. In this trend, there must be specific component suppliers benefiting from this investment trend (regardless of whether the AI on the device side can continuously boost the demand for phone replacement).

There is currently no clear evidence that whether Google/Samsung's continuous improvement of local-end AI services can drive the wave of phone replacement again.

From the fact that the shipment of Android folding phones (Samsung & Chinese brands) is lower than expected quickly, if the usage experience of folding phones does not improve significantly, the growth space of folding phones may be limited in the short term.

There are always some market participants optimisticly expecting that the shipments of mobile phones and PCs will have dramatic growth changes due to local-end AI. If the shipment of iPhone 16 series cannot be better than expected after its release in the second half of 2024 due to Apple Intelligence, then the above optimistic expectations may be revised and cause a downside risk to related stocks in the short term.