Google reportedly eyes launch of first foldable phone in June: CNBC

By Yasin Ebrahim

Investing.com -- Alphabet's (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google is expected to launch its first foldable smartphone in June, ramping up competition in the foldable phone space that has been dominated by market leader Samsung (KS:005930), CNBC reported Tuesday, citing internal communications.

The tech giant plans to unveil The Pixel Fold at its annual developer conference, Google I/O, on May 10, according to the report. The device, which will powered by Google’s Tensor G2 chip, CNBC said, citing the documents, will likely fetch a price tag in excess of $1,700, competing with the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4.

Samsung Group, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., and Motorola (NYSE:MSI) account for about 80% of the total foldable phone market share, recent data showed.

A Google spokesperson declined to comment, CNBC reported.

The report comes amid reports that Samsung is mulling whether to ditch Google’s search engine from its devices in favor of Microsoft’s Bing.

Google led to the downside for the second day in a row despite Wall Street downplaying the risk that the search engine giant could lose Samsung as a partner to Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). The New York Times reported on Monday that Samsung was mulling whether to ditch Google’s search engine from its devices for Microsoft’s Bing.

UBS downplayed the risk of Google Search losing its spot as the default search engine on Samsung devices.

"We think an actual partner loss (per NYT article Monday) is highly unlikely...any such discussions (if they are indeed occurring, which we do not know for sure) would more likely be part of negotiation tactics from Samsung [to get more leverage in ad-revenue share negotiations],” UBS said.