Samsung battles Apple and Sony to dominate the world of technology
Samsung the South Korean electronics group dynasty overtook Apple as the biggest profit generator in the second quarter of 2017 as Economist and Wall Street JOunrl Journalist, Geoffrey Cain highlights part of genius of Samsung’s business model” and reveals an explosive expose of one of the biggest and most secretive companies in the world, as Samsung battles Apple and Sony to dominate the world of technology.
Over decades that genius has included cronyism,political favour, bribery and anti-semitism.
The story of $275bn giant Samsung highlights with sales approaching $200bn last year and 180, 000 employees, is indeed the story of South Korea.
Like Sony’s rise from the ashes of the war for the Japanese, Samsung grew from humble beginnings to become the blue blooded employer of choice for graduates from the country’s universities.
Samsung gained global renown for its innovative gadget, but the Hubris scandal, exploding phones, bribes of millions of dollars and a racehorse gifted to the equestrian-minded daughter of ChoiSoon-sil, the confidante of former South Korean president Park Geun-hye.
Samsung’s tycoon felons, wiped hard drives , wire tapping and an errant son sequestered in a fishing village.
Samsung today has grown to become a market leader in the United States and around the globe after capturing one quarter of the smartphone market. Forty years ago Samsung was a rickety agricultural conglomerate that produced sugar, paper and fertilizer, located in the backward country with a third-world economy. With the rsie of the Personal computers Chairman Lee Byung-chul began to make Samsung a major supplier of computer chips. The company’s revenues have grown forty times from that of 1987, and make up more than 30 per cent of South Korea’s exports. The disastrous recall of th Galaxy Note 7, with numerous reports of phones spontaneously bursting into flames , reveals the dangers of the company’s headlong attempt to overtake Apple at any cost.
Samsung Rising’s penetrating look behind the curtains, spans characters from the dynastic founder Lee Byung-chul who used to tear his napkins to save money, through to his grandson Lee Jae-yong, the vie president of Samsung electronics who was jailed in 2017 on charges of corruption , although his five year sentence was halved and suspended on appeal six months later.
Samsung’s inability to learn from previous mistakes as various Lees are in and out of the courts condemned and pardoned . Products are still rushed to the market before they are ready – witness the breakable foldable phones first launched early last year.
Samsung took on Apple in terms of products and via a protracted and costly patent war.
Samsung Rising is also the story of how the company was behind the Oscar’s sefie posted by Ellen DeGeneres that was tweeted and retweeted so many times that it crashed Twitter.
This year Oscar-winner Parasite was backed by Lee Mie-kyung, granddaughter of the Samsung founder, as she led Samsung’s efforts to buy into DreamWorks ( copying Sony’s 1989 Columbia Pictures acquisition), falling she took a smaller slice of her own part of the empire, CJ Group.
Samsung Rising : Inside The Secretive Company Conquering Tech by Geoffrey Cain, Ebury £14.99, 416 pages.