Twisted Melon - Fine Mac OS Software

I'm not a pundit, nor a mathematician and certainly not an analyst, but I've been having as much fun as the next guy watching all the trouble Samsung has been having lately with words and numbers. I thought I'd do a little math with the numbers we've all seen tossed around lately, spiced up with a little speculation, just for fun.

First we had Samsung's announcement that it had shipped 2 million units of the Galaxy Tab. Then we found out those units were only shipped to distribution. Next we had reports of a 16% return rate courtesy of ITG, to which Samsung just today refuted as actually being "under 2%."

Yes, that's a lot of industry drama. But do you know what hasn't been reported at all yet? The actual number of units sold to retail customers.

So here here's an interesting thought... What if both Samsung and the research firm are correct?

What if Samsung's number is based on their distribution shipments of "2 million" units and the report numbers are based on actual sales (what stores would report). Let's assume the "under 2%" is 1.8% to give them some wiggle room.

That means 36000 returns on 2 million units. For which 36000 is 16% of 225000 units. (100/16= 6.25 x 36k = 225k)

That could mean only 225k units have actually been sold to customers, of which 36k have been returned. Or 250k if you use exactly 2% in calculation above.

In either case, it sounds like a runaway success to me.

ITG's report is US-based and Samsung's "2 million" count is global, so we're making some assumptions here by using that return rate as a global average. If instead we calculated with an 8% average global return rate, we'd get 450k units sold.

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