While Samsung's much anticipated Galaxy S3 smartphone won't be available for eager consumers to purchase until May 29 at the earliest, it hasn't stopped pre-orders for the phone from hitting a massive nine million units according to unnamed Samsung sources speaking to the Korea Economic Daily.

The sources said demand is so high that Samsung's factories are already running at full capacity, building around five million units a month. In comparison, it took them six months following the Galaxy S2's April, 2011 launch to hit their ten million sales target – a figure most industry experts at the time said was rather optimistic anyway. As of February 2012, over 20 million S2 handsets had been shipped worldwide.

Current demand for the Galaxy S3 looks set to eclipse those figures in record time at the current rate of pre-orders. Samsung typically works very hard to avoid problems with availability as a product launches, but it's entirely likely consumers will experience stock issues in much the same way it has become almost routine with Apple when launching the latest "i" device to the public.

Samsung's Galaxy S3 smartphone was officially unveiled at their Unpacked media event in London on May 3. As the company's latest flagship handset it has a massive feature list, including a 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED display with 1280x720 pixels and 306 ppi density. It's powered by an Exynos 1.4GHz quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, and 16/32/64GB of on-board storage which can be further expanded using the Micro-SD slot.

If pre-order numbers are anything to go by, there's little doubt that Samsung's latest flagship smartphone will result in very strong second quarter revenues for the South Korean company, as well as making it the undisputed king of Android handsets by shipping volume, and pre-order interest.

Samsung is also the current leader for all handset sales with 86.6 million units moved in the last quarter (smartphones and feature phones combined) displacing Nokia which held the No. 1 spot since 1998.