Samsung received a slight blow today in the ongoing boxing match between the Korean company and Apple. U.S. judge Lucy Koh has approved a request by Apple asking for Samsung’s sales figures to be revealed in the ongoing case between the two rivals.
After Samsung was ordered by jury to pay $1.05 billion dollars in compensation to Apple this past August for damages caused by the sale of Samsung’s Galaxy devices, Apple attempted to go even further by making a request to ban the sale of the devices in the U.S. entirely. After this request was denied, Apple made a new request to have Samsung reveal the sales numbers of its phones in an attempt to be granted further compensation, which Judge Koh has now approved. Samsung was already forced to show their old sales numbers earlier in the case, however, now they will be forced to show more recent figures.
Samsung was, however, given permission by Judge Koh to retain from releasing the sales information on two specific phone models because of their relevance to an ongoing appeal in the case.
While these copyright cases are often largely boring, it’s always interesting when a company is forced to reveal specific sales figures as these are numbers we typically can only speculate about. There can occasionally be significant differences between how successful we think a device is, compared to how successful it actually is. It’s only a matter of time now until we know with certainty just how many devices Samsung has sold recently.
This could get interesting in a hurry.