Court Documents Show Samsung Publicly Fudges Galaxy Tab Sales

Samsung has been caught wallowing in their own truthiness, according to court documents released as part of the current Samsung vs Apple court case. Daniel Eran Dilger over at AppleInsider did some excellent sleuthing and found Samsung’s report of 2 million Galaxy Tabs sold in the first six weeks was false and then some.

Internal Samsung documents show 1 million Tabs sold in all of 2011, compared to iPad sales of 17.4 million, Kindle Fire’s 5 million, and even 1.5 million Nooks, putting Samsung in fourth place.

This bit of information in particular caused a lot of ripples because research firms based reports on Samsung's falsified numbers. IDC said Steve Jobs was wrong about declaring Apple’s 90% market share because those 2 million Galaxy Tabs were 17% of the market. Strategy Analytics said that those 2 million were virtually all of the 2.1 million tablets shipped with Android for that quarter.

Also released were slides from Samsung’s presentation about the 2012 mobile landscape and how Android was projected to own 39% of the Total Addressable Market (TAM), with Samsung presumably selling a large part of the Android devices.

These slides also show a projection of 28 million tablets of any flavor sold in 2011. Looking back, I see that Apple alone sold 40 million tablets worldwide in 2011, quite a few more than Samsung’s total number.