I agree with the disagreement, we are also not talking about some one trick pony which solely depends on successfully selling this thing. Samsung as a whole and even the consumer electronics part alone is a massive and diversified conglomerate. They should be easily able to swallow the financial losses of such a failure in a single product category and let it survive during a bit of a lean period until customers regain trust which may even be not that long.

Samsung's profits are dominated by its mobile unit, which has given the division much increased power within the overall organization. (I was employed by a supplier to Samsung mobile, by even without that this is public knowledge).

The rest of the company has much thinner margins. This undeniably hurts their business.

In the public imagination, cars explode. No one expects their phone to explode, especially just... randomly and out of the clear blue.

But virtually nobody knows anyone who's phone has exploded, so I don't see this impacting Samsung that much.

But virtually everyone knows that they have exploded, has been told to shut them off on flights, has older relatives asking them if their S4 is save, etc... This is not going away, especially since they've been unable to figure out what's going wrong, and have just told people to turn it off.

Besides, driving is really dangerous, but calling your girlfriend isn't supposed to leave you with full thickness burns.

I also agree with this disagreement. Samsung is way too diversified to suffer from this setback.

I am sad because they discontinued the phone. I really like this phone, and can't wait for my next Samsung toy.