Samsung apparantly sold 2 million Galaxy Tabs to its partners & vendors

Just when it seemed as though Samsung managed to hit yet another milestone with the Galaxy Tab, it now appears that the case is not so.

In the greater scheme of things, the 2 million figure they reported last week about the Galaxy Tab is in fact a number that Samsung indicated that they achieved – but not in the same manner that most of us would initially perceive it to be. Specifically, Samsung instead was able to “sell-in” over 2 million units as opposed to “sell-out.” If you don't understand the jargon, don't be too worried because it seems like you're not the only one.

During their quarterly earnings call, a Samsung executive actually admitted that the true amount of units sold to customers were “quite small.” Lee Young-hee of Samsung said, “Well, your question was on sell-in and sell-out. As you heard, our sell-in was quite aggressive and this first quarterly result was quite, you know, fourth-quarter unit [figure] was around two million. Then, in terms of sell-out, we also believe it was quite small. We believe, as the introduction of new device, it was required to have consumers invest in the device. So therefore, even though sell-out wasn’t as fast as we expected, we still believe sell-out was quite OK.”

In Samsung land, the term sell-in is meant to describe the amount of sales to its partners and vendors, while “sell-out” is used to describe the actual customer sales from those vendors. So despite not actually selling 2 million Samsung Galaxy Tab units to customers worldwide, it'll only be a matter of time before its eventual arrival.

source: WSJ via SlashGear