Samsung said the new phone was selling faster than the Galaxy S III, which took 50 days to reach the 10 million mark, and the Galaxy S II, which did not reach that milestone until five months after its introduction.
Hype of this sort is, of course, part of the smartphone competition; last September, Apple trumpeted the fact that it had recorded two million orders for the iPhone 5 in 24 hours, before the phone had even been delivered to retailers.
Still, analysts were impressed that Samsung was showing that it, too, could produce pocket-size objects of desire that spur consumers to rush out and snap them up.
Mark Newman, who follows Samsung at Bernstein Research, said he had estimated a peak of 9 to 10 million monthly sales of the Galaxy S4; the fact that Samsung reached the threshold in a just under a month suggested “further upside for Samsung profits and stock,” he wrote in a note to clients.
