Samsung's foldable smartphones won't hit the market before 2019

We have been hearing tons of rumors regarding Samsung’s foldable smartphones over the last couple of years. The futuristic devices are coming, but we’ll still have to wait for quite some time before they hit the market.

At the Display TechSalon in Seoul, Kim Tae-woong, Samsung Display’s principal engineer, said that the highly-anticipated foldable smartphones will not be released before 2019. He added that the demand for devices with small bezels, like the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus, is currently very high, which gives the company some additional time to develop foldable displays. Additionally, the technology is still not quite ready, as there are a few more technical challenges that have to be tackled.

Chung Won-seok, an analyst at HI Investment and Securities, more or less said the same thing during the seminar. He believes that Samsung will release its first foldable smartphone in 2019 mainly because it is currently doing quite well in terms of sales with the so-called bezel-less smartphones. As soon as the demand for these devices slows down, Samsung will introduce what is predicted to be the next big hit on the market — foldable smartphones.

It is worth pointing out that Samsung isn’t the only company in the industry working on foldable smartphones, which means that we might still see the technology hit the market before 2019. Last year, Kang Chung-seok, an executive at Kolon Industries, said he expects that between three and five companies will start mass producing foldable smartphones in 2018.