Samsung’s 2018 flagship ‘Galaxy S9’ could cost a whopping $850

Galaxy S9 is expected to be unveiled at the Mobile World Congress.
Samsung’s 2018 flagship ‘Galaxy S9’ could cost a whopping $850
Samsung’s 2018 flagship ‘Galaxy S9’ could cost a whopping $850
Written by:

Excitement has already started building up over the next Samsung flagship smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy S9. According to industry watchers, the expectation is that the South Korean major will showcase the phone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona towards the end of this month and start accepting pre-orders immediately after that. The physical shipments are likely to follow and customers can hope to grab the device off the shelves by mid-March 2018.

But the current flutter is over the guestimate of the price Samsung would offer its next flagship. The broad opinion appears to be that the phone will be priced £100 (about $140) higher than that at which Samsung sold its previous year’s flagship, the Samsung Galaxy S8. This would mean the average UK buyer should be prepared to pay £789 to possess the Samsung Galaxy S9, as and when it is released or the pre-order bookings commence.

There are 2 strong reasons those speculating this price pint out statistics to justify their estimate that the increase would be of this magnitude. One is that both Samsung and its US rival Apple have realised that their smartphone flagships released in 2017, the Samsung Galaxy S8 and the iPhone X were also priced very high but buyers were ready to pay that kind of money for their devices. This has emboldened them to stick to that trend and keep the prices high and make more profits as evidenced from their companies’ financial results.

Though on today’s GBP to USD parity, the equivalent price in the US should be above $1100, the expectation is that Samsung may add the same $100 in the US also to the S8 price and sell the S9 for $850. But when Apple comes out with its next iteration of the iPhone, it may price it above the $1000 mark. In the UK market also, the iPhone to be released in 2018 could be offered at around £1000.

The flip-side of this trend of highly priced handsets is that more customers, particularly in markets like the UK seem to prefer to stay with their old device and have the ‘SIM only’ relationship with the carriers. There are still a large body of customers who go in for the bundled offers when a new phone gets released, particularly the top flagships from Samsung or Apple.

The primary attraction is the initial payout is only around 15% of the phone’s cost and depending on which carrier you choose, you can get a decent package of data to use per month and pay the monthly tariff. The phone price gets amortized over 24 months, usually and you end up paying almost 20% more over this period than what you would have to pay if you bought the handset alone.

Related Stories

No stories found.
The News Minute
www.thenewsminute.com