Samsung"s success in smartphone sales helped the South Korean-based company generate record profiles for the fourth quarter of the calendar year of 2011. The company announced today that it had a billion quarterly operating profit of 5.3 trillion won ($4.7 billion), thanks in part to sales of its Android-powered smartphones such as the Galaxy S II.
While Samsung did not reveal specific shipment or sales numbers for its smartphone lineup, it did say that sales of its smartphones, including the Galaxy Note and the new Galaxy Nexus, "drove up revenue for the year by almost 40 percent compared with the previous year." The company added that "shipments of Samsung smartphones rose by approximately 30 percent in the fourth quarter, compared with the previous quarter."
Reuters reports that according to estimates from research firm Strategy Analytics, Samsung sold 36.5 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2011. That would put its sales slightly behind that of Apple, which announced earlier this week that it had sold slightly over 37 million of its iPhone devices in the last quarter.
Samsung added that it will boost its spending in 2012 by nine percent to 25 trillion won ($22 billion) with over half of that money going to the company"s chips division.