DigiTimes, the Taiwanese rumor site that’s either totally right or hilariously wrong, says that Samsung has set themselves an internal goal of shipping over 500 million mobile phones this year. The company hasn’t said this publicly, but let’s do some math to see if the figure is reachable.

Half a billion devices in one year translates to 125 million units per quarter. According to a Strategy Analytics report that was covered by VentureBeat in January, Samsung sold 396.5 million phones during all of 2012. Now when I say phones, I mean everything from the high end Galaxy devices sold in the West to the $20 feature phones that people in emerging countries buy. Round up that number to 400 million and you get 100 million a quarter.

Is selling another 25 million devices every three months going to be that hard?

That’s an increase of less than 280,000 phones a day.

If you think about it like that, then sure, half a billion sounds “easy”.