Coming off a record year where it shipped over 300 million mobile phones, Samsung is reportedly looking to grow its annual shipments by 15% in 2012. The Korea Economic Daily adds that this translates to a goal of 374 million handsets, up from the 325 million units the company projects to sell this year. Smartphones alone could account for 150 million devices.
Samsung is clearly aiming to dethrone Nokia as the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer in the near future. Nokia’s shipments are predicted to fall about 5 percent to 399 million units in 2012 (based on data from Strategy Analytics). Nokia is planning a big launch in North America for its Lumia smartphones but it remains to be seen how it will fare against competition from Apple and Android device manufacturers.
With both the Consumer Electronics Show and Mobile World Congress around the corner, we will hopefully soon see the devices that Samsung plans to offer in order to meet its sales targets. It’s likely that we will see new models in the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab lineups (along with lower-end devices).