People still buy Ford cars even though they made the Pinto and their SUVs used Firestone tires. People still buy Toyota without even a thought as to whether the brakes work. People still buy any car whatsoever with an airbag without worrying if it'll spontaneously explode and, if not kill them, shred their face.
The rest of the company has much thinner margins. This undeniably hurts their business.
Besides, driving is really dangerous, but calling your girlfriend isn't supposed to leave you with full thickness burns.
I am sad because they discontinued the phone. I really like this phone, and can't wait for my next Samsung toy.
They make everything from cutting edge phones to air-conditioning. One product in one business area going wrong like this is not going to be fatal.
I wouldn't have initiated such name-calling, but I do think the OP's reaction is over the top and silly, given the context.
Samsung SDI is going to struggle in a World with cheap coal prices and political inclinations (cf. Trump campaign) to not care about environmental impacts.
Samsung Heavy Industries is already struggling because of market demands for new container ships dropping off sharply in recent years - there has been a glut of supply for some years.
Their Engineering and Construction groups have moderate turnover on focused/strategic projects that go to lowest-cost bidders, they can't keep the entire company going.
They have a reasonable sized Financial Services group of companies, but they're not exactly global players, and it's going to be hard to see them picking up enough growth to keep things going if their consumer electronics division flounders.
They have a group dedicated to health and medical equipment, that might do well, but the largest market for healthcare in the World (the US), is currently playing political football with that industry, so, you know, tricky.
Their washing machines are exploding, and demand for products like air conditioning remains high but might be curbed by issues in the power sector within developing nations as people try to figure out what that infrastructure looks like on the 10-year, 25-year and 50-year terms, which again, they are fighting in another group.
They have a ton of electronics businesses that will continue to do well, but ironically because Apple is one of their biggest customers for their products.
It's not obvious to me that they are more robust than Nokia was. They have a lot of risks across a lot of their groups, with their phone division being perhaps the lowest risk group of the lot.
Good luck to them, but the Samsung fanbois (and yes, there are many of them), need to realise this is going to be a tough time for the company. For the sake of the smaller stockholders and the employees, I hope they get through this.
One phone will not kill this.
Having just bought a new Samsung washing machine, the story that they are exploding seems to have passed me by.
I'm not a fanboi - I'm typing this on a Nexus 6 and considering another motorola next - I just think that saying this might be fatal is somewhat silly.
The irony!
Look at Toyota's unintended acceleration issues as a good example. Has it really impacted them many months on?
Since the flagships are all pretty close these days, it will be more challenging to get them back due to the upgrade cycle.
40% of Android users upgrade as soon as provider allows (usually every 2 years) while 58% wait until their current phone dies or becomes obsolete. [1]
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/07/09/how-oft...
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/95yearold-woman-rescued-from-samsu...
http://www.smh.com.au/business/retail/samsung-overhauls-wash...
Second link claims 49 fires in 3.5 years
This was on the local news where I live: http://www.wfaa.com/news/samsung-washing-machine-explodes-in...
Nobody in the UK has a top-loader, which I suppose is why it hasn't been that public here.
I think that if you compare Samsung's Note 7 to Nokia's Burning Platform, the prospects for Samsung are significantly better (Nokia not only destroyed the value of 100% of their inventory but also all of their future inventory until the OS changeover happened; Samsung has a branding problem but can release another device).
Honestly, they should just rename it to something else (at the very least not the Note, but maybe even call it something other than Samsung in the US).
Edit: I do agree with your supposition that mobile is the primary revenue driver for Samsung, but I don't actually think they're generating a profit from mobile any more. I continue to contend that the only company that makes a profit on mobile is Apple and they continue to dominate that market for reasons that are fairly obvious (supply chain, silicon superiority, and software that works faster for the workloads consumers run on their devices).
Nokia was around 4-5% of Finland and some say its loss was the best thing to happen of the country's tech sector. I haven't seen any real analysis however.
I think this will hurt Samsung significantly but not fatally. They'll come back with a nice fancy new phone (although they may not re-use the Note moniker) and they'll price it at barely above break-even to encourage people to give them another chance, and people will love them again.
They are both true. If Samsung faltered, the Korean economy would take a hit, but the government would almost certainly prop it up such that it wouldn't actually fail.
Presumably a bailout would take the form of an injection of liquidity sourced from sovereign debt denominated in KRW, much like the US bank bailout a few years ago. If it were large enough, it could depress the won against other global currencies. In the limiting case, the Koreans can always -- if they really need to -- print money until their exports get attractive again. People may not want to buy Samsung phones, but they'll certainly buy Samsung steel or Samsung heavy industrial equipment, if the price is right.
But you backpedalled on that point already as well, and no one, even the biggest fanboy, would argue that they are not going to have large problems. Like every large company somewhere on its track.
They're not going anywhere as a corporation.
I'd expect a certain amount of bloodletting in their leadership, depending on exactly how bad the recall and consequent damage to their mobile electronics business is. But it's not an existential threat to the entire organization.
OTOH, the Galaxy S3 wasnt too bad, but perhaps that's b/c I have been conditioned to bad phones since every phone I've owned since the Motorola flip & the Razr has been complete shit.
The remote is a terrible piece of shit, and I disabled the "Smart" TV features the moment that thing showed be a goddamn ad, but as a front end for my Apple TV/Playstation 4 it's quite good.
there is no excuse for putting ads on any tv without explicitly state it.
I'm not actually getting 4k video out of my TV, (since neither the apple tv or playstation support it), but I'm not terribly concerned about that (as I can't tell the difference at the distance I sit from my television).
I wanted a dumb TV anyway, but costco didn't have any at the size I was looking for when I purchased it.
But then again, I have an LG Optimus L9 that I thought would kick the bucket tomorrow for over a year now, and it keeps working...
You'd be surprised about how much of the general public even knows that there is a type of Samsung phone that can spontaneously combust, and the proportion of those people that care and will continue to remember that fact when they are looking for a new phone is also going to be quite small.
I have had to explain the story to friends who gave me blank looks when I explained that my Samsung S7 was not the kind that exploded...
In Samsung's shoes, I'd kill the Note brand.
There have been reports of ultrathin phones from several different brands bending and cracking in people's back pockets for years. Honestly I'm impressed that manufacturers lasted so long without a bunch of explosions, given the energy density of these fragile gadgets. I also don't quite see the point of anything thinner than 9-10 millimeters.
Lack of durability may have been more acceptable in an era of incredibly fast innovation on the hardware front (planned obsolescence, hurray!) but now that most flagship phones have comparable features, perhaps someone will begin to design phones that last more than a year or two. With replaceable batteries, of course.
I think this is an overreaction. I have a Samsung, and will buy another if it's the best value for what I need next time I'm phone shopping.
Consumers have short memories and there aren't that many legitimate alternatives to Apple.
I think there would be relatively less people who won't buy a samsung because of this event. There are other much larger reasons.
It's a pretty nasty trick the Americans pulled on Samsung, and we'll see how this plays out in the end. It was bound to happen as Samsung completely began to dwarf Apple, and snubbed the CIA operated Facebook. Taking on American tech corps is akin to taking on the NSA and CIA.
For now their best bet is to narrow down the culprits, reassess who their friends are if they have any (I think they're heavily dependent on Americans). It's obvious there's a move to break Samsung apart and to feed their remains to the American tech corps, so Samsung will likely have to play second fiddle to US intel lackeys like Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc...
This seems like a huge overreaction, even if their phones are exploding - why would that matter if I'm looking at a monitor? They've produced millions of non-exploding product, so this is just some mistake that dropped in.
The average consumer won't remember this in a month.
People have short-term memories and will vote with their wallets if they see a new product that seems "worth the cost" of ownership.
VW has a huge customer base in enterprise and government. As long as trucks are not affected by faked emission tests, both won't dump Volkswagen. And even if: many large corporations and government institutions run their own car/truck repair shops, sometimes even their own parts storage (the most extreme is certainly UPS) in order to save money - and you can't just switch over all that to a new manufacturer.
> Similar situation with BP - they are not in the doldrums.
For gas directly sold by BP to customers: who cares? Consumers only look at the pump price, they're not as politicized as e.g. during Brent Spar 1995. The other branches / customers of bp are all corporate, where there is no incentive except prices to switch suppliers.
I've heard actually that people are having an enormous difficulty getting refunds for the phones they already purchased, with Samsung responding to their requests with verbose but meaningless legalese.
The damage will be to their stock and missed profits from Note 7 sales, as well as some loss to lawsuits. Maybe it will teach them to not rush phones or listen to engineering. Who knows, maybe they'll even add removable batteries or fix the AMOLED flicker.
Why do you assume that it wasn't an engineering screw up to begin with? They had two chances and didn't get it right. Not all technical problems are the fault of MBA's.
And I get down voted... Stay happy in your silos HN
Will this hurt them in the short run? Yes, but unless they die before the next phone is out and gets rave reviews from at least a subgroup, this won't matter long term - does anybody even remember antenna gate?
tech sites tend to over exaggerate impact of technologies because many fail to associate the fact common interest brought them to the discussion site in the first place
Remember that? It affected all Samsung EVO drives, which is marketing speak for all Samsung SLC based drives, which means budget drives, the Pro versions based on MLC were unaffected.
But, the way Samsung handled my case, to deny warranty, and in general case to release an .exe file on their website called "Slow fix something.exe", has me stay away from Samsung SSDs for ever.
The other "fix" they had was to release a firmware which would shuffle data around in the background - reading and rewriting/updating cells - so as to appear that there is no problem - but read speed would anyway decrease with age, and increase the write-cycles on the cells even if the SSD is idle... Fun.
I recommend SanDisk Extreme Pro -- they are awesome good value drives - may exist newer on the market now, but last autumn those were and still are the best SSDs ever.
Consumer SSDs use MLC. Enterprise SSDs use SLC almost exclusively or eMLC which has less issues than consumer grade MLC.
MLC is about storing multiple bits in a single tiny cell. This results in more capacity at the cost of total write cycles, read errors being more likely and slower read and write speeds.
TLC is MLC but with three bits per cell.
The 850s use 3D NAND at 40nm process, and in terms of performance and capacity per dollar are pretty much still unmatched.
I haven't kept up with that, I'm still using Samsung 470, 830 and Crucial M4 SSDs, which are rock f&^king solid, knock on wood.
But when they were released, with their much lower price tag, their TLC chips (with a huge SLC buffer to make it seem faster) seemed a bit suspicious - basically cheaper MLC, and that's not a good thing in this case.
It is, however, surprising that they didn't get it right.
Li-ion batteries are seemingly trickier than we consumers assume. Apple had a bit of bad press with the iPhone 4 when batteries starting exploding as well. I thought the industry would have worked it out since then, but according to many of the other comments in this (and other related) threads, Li-ion batteries are still an area of considerable research.
It's been the power-user line, the most full-featured variant, often more expensive than the Galaxy proper. "Flagship" is a loose term - they probably marketed the Galaxy proper more heavily, but the Note was their top-of-the-range phone, at least for a certain demographic.
There is no scenario under which the failure of one product, particularly the Note (far less popular than the Galaxy), ends the massive conglomerate known as Samsung. It's ~13% of South Korea's GDP and is very diverse. Samsung is so large and diverse it could end their entire lineup of smart phones and would still continue on as a successful technology company.
Its gonna hurt their sales for now and probably next year.
I think that samsung will continue to dominate the android market whatsoever for the next years to come.
They have spent a huge amount of money on marketing this phone. I wrote a week or so back it could be the end of Samsung and people told me I was an idiot - they make so many other things, their spread is so broad, they can just produce the next phone and move on.
This has done untold damage to their brand in the eyes of the average consumer and has wasted so much money, I think they are going to need to get smart, and quickly.
First, all those sales are now refunded. That is going to hurt cashflow and cause ripples across the entire business. Sure, it's not going to hurt some of their industrial projects but hampered cash flow is like having a respiratory disease: most people who get pneumonia don't die of the pneumonia, but organs shutting down because of the lack of oxygen they get as a result of the pneumonia.
Secondly, a lot of marketing dollars are now wasted, gone. They did a global campaign around the Olympics for this phone - it doesn't get much bigger. Just be glad that they didn't launch this in early February otherwise they would have taken every Super Bowl slot available. Those who do remember their advertising around this spend will remember it as them talking about a phone that scared airlines into thinking it might take down an aircraft.
Finally, many consumers won't buy Samsung phones again as a minimum when they're first released, maybe never as a worst case scenario. This has done long-term damage, we can't deny it.
I know a lot of people are fans of Samsung, and it's true they are a great company, but objectively this has got to be damaging to them.