【Omnibus  Archives】

Samsung has sold more than 5 million units of its new Galaxy S8 smartphone,Omnibus  Archives the company has confirmed.

“Although we cannot provide detailed figures, the sales are going smoothly around the globe. The combined sales already are beyond 5 million units,” an unnamed Samsung official told Korea's The Investor.

It's unclear what, exactly, this means. Samsung's Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus have only been on the market 25 days (and even shorter in Europe and India; the phones are still not available in China). A recent report claimed Samsung sold 7.2 million units of its Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge phones in the first quarter of availability, which would mean the S8 is selling better than its predecessor.

On the other hand, one early report on Galaxy S7 sales claimed Samsung had shipped 10 million units in the first three weeks of availability. The difference here could be "shipped" vs. "sold," but we cannot be sure know which metric Samsung's official is referring to when talking about the S8 in this latest report.

We've asked Samsung to clarify and will update this text when we hear from them.

Most successful pre-sales ever

Samsung previously said the S8 and the S8 Plus had the most successful pre-sale period in the company's history.

Whichever way you slice it, the 5 million figure is at the very least a return to form for Samsung, which suffered a major setback after it had to pull its previous flagship phone, the Galaxy Note 7, from the market due to numerous reports of its battery overheating and bursting into flames.

To put the numbers into perspective, Apple typically sells from 40 to 75 million iPhones per quarter, though that figure includes all iPhone models, not only the latest ones. Samsung's flagship is unlikely to reach those numbers, but the company has a much larger lineup of devices, while Apple only sells a handful of models. But the Note7 fiasco caused Samsung to drop to second place in overall smartphone sales in the last quarter, with Apple emerging on top by a slim margin.

On a yearly basis, however, Samsung still sells a lot more smartphones than Apple, and that's unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

(Editor: {typename type="name"/})