Samsung was only able to sell its new flagship smartphone for a couple of weeks before it had to confirm the battery defect, suspend sales globally and issue a recall. Over the past week it has been involved in the massive exercise to exchange all faulty Galaxy Note 7 units with safe ones. The exchange program is coming along nicely but the company is yet to resume sales of its latest flagship. Samsung is going to start selling the Galaxy Note 7 in South Korea come September 28 but the wait is going to be longer for customers elsewhere.
David Lowes, the chief marketing officer at Samsung in Europe, has said: “We fully expect (new Note7s) to be available everywhere by the end of November … well before the end of the fourth quarter.” The company is yet to provide precise dates on which sales will resume in countries across Europe. Reports suggest that it will start selling the Galaxy Note 7 in the United States, Australia and Singapore in October.
Even as investors forecast an 8 percent drop in Samsung’s third quarter operating profit due to the Galaxy Note 7 recall, Lowes is confident that Samsung will be able to recover from this. “We are confident that we can start to make up any ground that we have lost and get that momentum back into our business… get that total momentum back as we exit 2016 and set ourselves up for a strong 2017.”
He pointed out that there’s still a lot of demand for this handset in Europe much of which was already in pre-order phase before sales were suspended. Lowes also said that Samsung has no plans to scale back its original marketing plans for the Galaxy Note 7 following the battery debacle, this means that we can expect the company to go all out in order to rebuild consumer trust in its latest flagship and sell as many units as it possibly can.
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