Companies issue financial results four times a year. Nothing new. Samsung will publish their Q1 2013 financial results later this month, but today they’ve announced something known as “pre-earnings guidance“. That’s a fancy way of saying sneak peek.
With that out of the way, here are the numbers: $7.7 billion in profits, which is up 52.9% from the same quarter a year ago, but down (understandably) 1.6% from Q4 2012. As for revenues, they hit $46.28 billion, which is down from $52.4 billion in the previous quarter.
How many smartphones did Samsung actually sell during the first three months of 2013? According to five analysts who spoke to Reuters, the answer is approximately 68 to 70 million. That’s up from 63 million in the previous quarter.
The funny thing about Samsung is that don’t report how many phones they’ve sold, so it’s really anyone’s guess at this point. There are rumors that say Samsung seeds their data to a hand picked group of analyst firms, but that’s pretty illegal.