Samsung seeing ‘larger than expected’ S4 demand, struggling to make enough RAM chips

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 8 Apr 2013

According to the Taiwanese supply chain and rumor website website DigiTimes, Samsung is in a bind. They’re the world’s largest producer of memory chips, but apparently they’re not making enough memory chips for mobile devices. DigiTimes says GS4 demand is “larger than expected”, and that’s forcing Samsung to rush to devote more resources to manufacture mobile DRAM. That’s causing the price of computer RAM to go up.

The world will probably never know what Samsung’s GS4 sales targets are, but it’s saying a lot that even they didn’t even anticipate how many millions of units they’d have to be making.

It’s anyone’s guess really as to how many GS4 units Samsung will ship when it hits the market. I’ve been trying to find analyst predictions, but no one wants to risk their reputation and throw down a number. To provide some context, the GS3 managed to sell over 20 million units within the first 100 days of it being available.

Let’s assume for a moment that Samsung will easily double that this year. That’s 40 million units in what’s roughly the span of a quarter. In Apple’s best quarter for iPhone sales, their fiscal Q1 2013 quarter, the company sold 47.8 million iPhones.

Is it crazy to suggest that Samsung can sell as many GS4 units in one quarter as Apple sells iPhones?