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[drip, drip, drip, drip, drip…] 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 pe

[drip, drip, drip, drip, drip…] 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.

drcross 10y ago
The Note was not a flagship line. Samsung has so many other industries that I think it will do just fine in the long run.
- hellofunk 10y ago
  Except that their washing machines are also exploding.
  - JorgeGT 10y ago
    As long as it's not their LNG ships... https://www.samsungshi.com/eng/Product/ship_overview.aspx https://www.samsungshi.com/eng/Product/ship_overview.aspx
  - antocv 10y ago
    And their SSDs have hardware design flaws making them read slower and slower until the read speed of old cells is down to 1-2megabytes/second... of advertised 550megabytes/s. 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.
    - imtringued 10y ago
      >which is marketing speak for all Samsung SLC based drives, which means budget drives 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.
    - snovv_crash 10y ago
      That was just the 840 Evo models, with their 19nm planar TLC NAND. The 850s use 3D NAND at 40nm process, and in terms of performance and capacity per dollar are pretty much still unmatched.
    - prodmerc 10y ago
      Huh so EVOs have proven to be not so good? 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.
- cotinoco 10y ago
  Of course the Note is a flagship line. And they did everything they could so they could have this phone out to compete with the iPhone 7.
  - Intermernet 10y ago
    I see the iPhone 7 as a competitor to the Galaxy S7 (quite a nice phone by the way). The Note range has always been more of a "phablet" than Samsung's flagship line. 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.
    - lmm 10y ago
      > The Note range has always been more of a "phablet" than Samsung's flagship line. 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.
      - Intermernet 10y ago
        True, I'll accept that, in the same way that the iPhone 7 Plus is Apple's flagship phone for certain demographics vs. the iPhone 7 .
- oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
  It will definitely harm the company-as-a-brand, though. People following the news who haven't owned a Samsung phone before might well be put off any Samsung device, ignoring the distinction between the Note and other lines. If it were only about the phone model, the fallout might be much smaller, but it's now become about Samsung's appalling handling of the problems too.
  - danielbln 10y ago
    Hell, I owned Galaxy phones for the last 5 years, and even I will be hesitant buying the next Galaxy and will probably wait a few months to see, if any problems show up.
hellofunk 10y ago
> First, all those sales are now refunded. 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.
- cdubzzz 10y ago
  This is actually the reason I already avoid Samsung. They seem to have abysmal customer service in the US. Particularly compared to Apple for mobile devices.
MicroBerto 10y ago
> many consumers won't buy Samsung phones again as a minimum when they're first released, maybe never as a worst case scenario. 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.
- jonlucc 10y ago
  I think you overestimate the ability of consumers to discriminate between phones. Samsung intentionally named their phones "Samsung Galaxy S7" and "Samsung Note 7". Lots of people don't know that only one of the two is exploding (anecdotally, my wife and her parents).
- toxican 10y ago
  Personally I'm hoping the next iteration of the Note sees a nice price drop to convince consumers to buy back in. I'd jump in at that point.
  - Nursie 10y ago
    If it boots them out of the prestige-pricing range into the "it's got every feature of the rest for a hundred bucks less, you'd be crazy not to" range that Google used to inhabit with Nexus, that could be a good thing...
Nursie 10y ago
It's obviously not good but yes, you were an idiot to say it could be the end of Samsung. 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.
- PaulRobinson 10y ago
  Well, let's go through their other businesses. 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.
  - josh2600 10y ago
    Samsung is too much of South Korea's GDP to go bankrupt. For Samsung to fail, the Korean economy would have to also fail, which is possible but unlikely. 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).
muse900 10y ago
You are forgetting something. People do forget. 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.
DasIch 10y ago
Samsung isn't just a company it's a conglomerate. Their entire mobile division could crash and they'd still be fine.
Shivetya 10y ago
end of samsung, come this time next year most of the public won't even remember the issue. then consider that many just tune this type of news out anyway if they have had no issues. 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
- Shivetya 10y ago
  okay, I give, how did that comment offend? Samsung will have little or no discernible impact from this event. Techies tend to think to the world thinks like they do and rotates around their ideas but we are such a small segment that we tend to miss the big picture.
wingerlang 10y ago
> This has done untold damage to their brand in the eyes of the average consumer.. 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.
jsjohnst 10y ago
I don't have a link to a story to support this, but I heard they make more money off the sell of parts (screen panels, memory, etc) to Apple for iPhones than they do selling their own phones. Not sure if this is still true, but I do know it was true at one point.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
I completely disagree. People love shiny and they have a short memory even though there's this wonderful thing called the internet that can remember things for them. All Samsung has to do is come out with something shiny and people will be buying it and blogging about it. 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.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  In the public imagination, cars explode. No one expects their phone to explode, especially just... randomly and out of the clear blue.
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    But virtually nobody knows anyone who's phone has exploded, so I don't see this impacting Samsung that much.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      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.
- catdog 10y ago
  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.
grkvlt 10y ago
> This has done untold damage to their brand in the eyes of the average consumer 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...
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  This time almost everybody knows. With every flight announcing "you can use your electronic devices now, in airplane mode - except for the Galaxy Note 7, that must stay off during all the trip", people won't forget for a while. In Samsung's shoes, I'd kill the Note brand.
  - pimlottc 10y ago
    You may be surprised how much of the general public doesn't fly regularly.
    - scottmf 10y ago
      There's certainly a significant overlap between people who fly and people who buy flagship Samsung phones.
- _asummers 10y ago
  Your last paragraph contradicts your overall point. To me, that reads like your friends associated it with the entire brand, not that they were unaware of the exploding phones. That's worse for Samsung.
  - grkvlt 10y ago
    No, they were unaware that there was an exploding phone, let alone a Samsung exploding phone. It surprised me, as some of them were pretty technically literate.
dingo_bat 10y ago
I think this is going to hurt them a lot but it's nowhere near enough to "end" them. Also, as an S7 edge owner I'm more than satisfied with the device. My next phone (2 years later) is probably going to be from Samsung again, unless apple actually makes a compelling phone again. I think there would be relatively less people who won't buy a samsung because of this event. There are other much larger reasons.
kijin 10y ago
It may not be the end of Samsung, but I sure hope that this will mark the end of an era in smartphone design -- an era during which everyone rushed to make the thinnest, flattest, flimsiest phone ever, durability be damned. 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.
- willtim 10y ago
  This. I just don't understand the thinness obsession. I was given an iPhone by my work recently and I am amazed how impractical it is. It's slippery to hold, difficult to pick up and just incredibly fragile. I was recommended to buy a case for it ASAP. There's basically no chance it will survive a drop. Personally I think the design is awful. It's the "emperor's new clothes".
  - Animats 10y ago
    That's what's so amusing about this. The incredibly thin phones have to be put in incredibly bulky cases. A super-thin iPhone in a case is as bulky as my Cat B15 ruggedized smartphone, which will survive being run over by a truck and has a bigger battery.
vamur 10y ago
They are still selling S7/Edge by the truckloads - not to mention old versions of the S phones and Notes. And some consumers are even buying their incomprehensible A/C/J/E phones. And they are introducing S8 in March, and given lack of viable competition on high-end Android it will sell like hotcakes. 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.
- jrowley 10y ago
  Exactly, they also have an entire line up semiconductors and screens. Samsung is not just a phone company.
- EpicEng 10y ago
  >Maybe it will teach them to not rush phones or listen to engineering 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
kalleboo 10y ago
They could just rebrand. Here in Japan, Korean companies are unpopular so they're just branded "Galaxy" with no "Samsung" to be seen.
- etrevino 10y ago
  Is that because of longstanding racial animosity or some other reason?
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    Well that, and financial competitiveness. Samsung and LG have been eating Sony/Panasonic/Toshiba/etc's lunch the past decade.
matwood 10y ago
It's certainly not the end of Samsung. It may be the end of the Note brand, but they will make more phones and people will buy them.
jhatax 10y ago
If this were the case, VW would surely have abandoned ship and shuttered their factories. They haven't. Similar situation with BP - they are not in the doldrums. People have short-term memories and will vote with their wallets if they see a new product that seems "worth the cost" of ownership.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  > If this were the case, VW would surely have abandoned ship and shuttered their factories. They haven't. 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.
pasbesoin 10y ago
Wiping out a quarter of their mobile division's profits is hardly going to do them in. (The last guestimate I saw as to the cost of this.)
Zikes 10y ago
There was a time when people in the US died from randomly poisoned Tylenol, yet today it's the go-to OTC pain relief medicine in America.
- sib 10y ago
  Right, but it's pretty significant that it was Samsung who produced the exploding phones, while it was a criminal who tampered with perfectly good Tylenol pills. I'm sure that Samsung would take less of a hit if there were an individual who was attached small explosives to Galaxy Note devices.
tomjen3 10y ago
A creative marketing agency could totally spin that the phone was so packed with power that it couldn't work, but this new shiny thing is even better and completely safe. 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?
levelist_com 10y ago
As a person that owns both a Samsung Washer & Dryer (they just did a recall on top load washers I believe), a Samsung Refrigerator, and at one point a Samsung television, I can assure you all of their products (that I have owned or currently own) are poorly designed, and more so, poorly manufactured garbage. I will never knowingly buy a Samsung product again. I replaced the TV after it came out about their efforts to track user behavior, etc.. The TV and its apps were garbage anyhow. Stay away from Samsung. 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.
- eric_h 10y ago
  I'm quite happy with my Samsung TV - picture quality is great. 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.
  - woobar 10y ago
    If you don't mind me asking - how did you assert the quality of the picture? Did you use professional calibration or run some tests yourself?
    - eric_h 10y ago
      Haha, certainly nothing so scientific. The picture just looks good to me, and compared with other TVs that I saw on display it was better than a number of the other options that were both cheaper and more expensive.
  - dawnerd 10y ago
    Except you can't fully disable ads unless they've patched it in the last 6 or so months. I had a very long back and forth with them about it and they kept denying it until finally admitting that it was impossible to disable. Worse, they were using the notification bar to advertise gamefly. Not cool. Keep in mind the TV I had was their flagship first gen 4k tv. There's no excuse for putting ads on a nearly 5k dollar tv.
adventured 10y ago
> it could be the end of Samsung 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.
abysmallyideal 10y ago
They're estimated to have to have to pay over (or have losses of) $5 billion! The class action lawsuits haven't even started yet, and you bet your ass InQTel, Facebook, Apple shell corps are going to be funding those lawsuits to the billions if it goes there. 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...

drcross 10y ago

The Note was not a flagship line. Samsung has so many other industries that I think it will do just fine in the long run.

hellofunk 10y ago
Except that their washing machines are also exploding.
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  As long as it's not their LNG ships... https://www.samsungshi.com/eng/Product/ship_overview.aspx https://www.samsungshi.com/eng/Product/ship_overview.aspx
- antocv 10y ago
  And their SSDs have hardware design flaws making them read slower and slower until the read speed of old cells is down to 1-2megabytes/second... of advertised 550megabytes/s. 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.
  - imtringued 10y ago
    >which is marketing speak for all Samsung SLC based drives, which means budget drives 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.
  - snovv_crash 10y ago
    That was just the 840 Evo models, with their 19nm planar TLC NAND. The 850s use 3D NAND at 40nm process, and in terms of performance and capacity per dollar are pretty much still unmatched.
  - prodmerc 10y ago
    Huh so EVOs have proven to be not so good? 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.
cotinoco 10y ago
Of course the Note is a flagship line. And they did everything they could so they could have this phone out to compete with the iPhone 7.
- Intermernet 10y ago
  I see the iPhone 7 as a competitor to the Galaxy S7 (quite a nice phone by the way). The Note range has always been more of a "phablet" than Samsung's flagship line. 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.
  - lmm 10y ago
    > The Note range has always been more of a "phablet" than Samsung's flagship line. 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.
    - Intermernet 10y ago
      True, I'll accept that, in the same way that the iPhone 7 Plus is Apple's flagship phone for certain demographics vs. the iPhone 7 .
oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
It will definitely harm the company-as-a-brand, though. People following the news who haven't owned a Samsung phone before might well be put off any Samsung device, ignoring the distinction between the Note and other lines. If it were only about the phone model, the fallout might be much smaller, but it's now become about Samsung's appalling handling of the problems too.
- danielbln 10y ago
  Hell, I owned Galaxy phones for the last 5 years, and even I will be hesitant buying the next Galaxy and will probably wait a few months to see, if any problems show up.

hellofunk 10y ago

> First, all those sales are now refunded. 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.

cdubzzz 10y ago
This is actually the reason I already avoid Samsung. They seem to have abysmal customer service in the US. Particularly compared to Apple for mobile devices.

MicroBerto 10y ago

> many consumers won't buy Samsung phones again as a minimum when they're first released, maybe never as a worst case scenario. 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.

jonlucc 10y ago
I think you overestimate the ability of consumers to discriminate between phones. Samsung intentionally named their phones "Samsung Galaxy S7" and "Samsung Note 7". Lots of people don't know that only one of the two is exploding (anecdotally, my wife and her parents).
toxican 10y ago
Personally I'm hoping the next iteration of the Note sees a nice price drop to convince consumers to buy back in. I'd jump in at that point.
- Nursie 10y ago
  If it boots them out of the prestige-pricing range into the "it's got every feature of the rest for a hundred bucks less, you'd be crazy not to" range that Google used to inhabit with Nexus, that could be a good thing...

Nursie 10y ago

It's obviously not good but yes, you were an idiot to say it could be the end of Samsung. 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.

PaulRobinson 10y ago
Well, let's go through their other businesses. 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.
- josh2600 10y ago
  Samsung is too much of South Korea's GDP to go bankrupt. For Samsung to fail, the Korean economy would have to also fail, which is possible but unlikely. 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).

muse900 10y ago

You are forgetting something. People do forget. 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.

DasIch 10y ago

Samsung isn't just a company it's a conglomerate. Their entire mobile division could crash and they'd still be fine.

Shivetya 10y ago

end of samsung, come this time next year most of the public won't even remember the issue. then consider that many just tune this type of news out anyway if they have had no issues. 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

Shivetya 10y ago
okay, I give, how did that comment offend? Samsung will have little or no discernible impact from this event. Techies tend to think to the world thinks like they do and rotates around their ideas but we are such a small segment that we tend to miss the big picture.

wingerlang 10y ago

> This has done untold damage to their brand in the eyes of the average consumer.. 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.

jsjohnst 10y ago

I don't have a link to a story to support this, but I heard they make more money off the sell of parts (screen panels, memory, etc) to Apple for iPhones than they do selling their own phones. Not sure if this is still true, but I do know it was true at one point.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

I completely disagree. People love shiny and they have a short memory even though there's this wonderful thing called the internet that can remember things for them. All Samsung has to do is come out with something shiny and people will be buying it and blogging about it. 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.

M_Grey 10y ago
In the public imagination, cars explode. No one expects their phone to explode, especially just... randomly and out of the clear blue.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  But virtually nobody knows anyone who's phone has exploded, so I don't see this impacting Samsung that much.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    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.
catdog 10y ago
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.

grkvlt 10y ago

> This has done untold damage to their brand in the eyes of the average consumer 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...

marcosdumay 10y ago
This time almost everybody knows. With every flight announcing "you can use your electronic devices now, in airplane mode - except for the Galaxy Note 7, that must stay off during all the trip", people won't forget for a while. In Samsung's shoes, I'd kill the Note brand.
- pimlottc 10y ago
  You may be surprised how much of the general public doesn't fly regularly.
  - scottmf 10y ago
    There's certainly a significant overlap between people who fly and people who buy flagship Samsung phones.
_asummers 10y ago
Your last paragraph contradicts your overall point. To me, that reads like your friends associated it with the entire brand, not that they were unaware of the exploding phones. That's worse for Samsung.
- grkvlt 10y ago
  No, they were unaware that there was an exploding phone, let alone a Samsung exploding phone. It surprised me, as some of them were pretty technically literate.

dingo_bat 10y ago

I think this is going to hurt them a lot but it's nowhere near enough to "end" them. Also, as an S7 edge owner I'm more than satisfied with the device. My next phone (2 years later) is probably going to be from Samsung again, unless apple actually makes a compelling phone again. I think there would be relatively less people who won't buy a samsung because of this event. There are other much larger reasons.

kijin 10y ago

It may not be the end of Samsung, but I sure hope that this will mark the end of an era in smartphone design -- an era during which everyone rushed to make the thinnest, flattest, flimsiest phone ever, durability be damned. 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.

willtim 10y ago
This. I just don't understand the thinness obsession. I was given an iPhone by my work recently and I am amazed how impractical it is. It's slippery to hold, difficult to pick up and just incredibly fragile. I was recommended to buy a case for it ASAP. There's basically no chance it will survive a drop. Personally I think the design is awful. It's the "emperor's new clothes".
- Animats 10y ago
  That's what's so amusing about this. The incredibly thin phones have to be put in incredibly bulky cases. A super-thin iPhone in a case is as bulky as my Cat B15 ruggedized smartphone, which will survive being run over by a truck and has a bigger battery.

vamur 10y ago

They are still selling S7/Edge by the truckloads - not to mention old versions of the S phones and Notes. And some consumers are even buying their incomprehensible A/C/J/E phones. And they are introducing S8 in March, and given lack of viable competition on high-end Android it will sell like hotcakes. 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.

jrowley 10y ago
Exactly, they also have an entire line up semiconductors and screens. Samsung is not just a phone company.
EpicEng 10y ago
>Maybe it will teach them to not rush phones or listen to engineering 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

kalleboo 10y ago

They could just rebrand. Here in Japan, Korean companies are unpopular so they're just branded "Galaxy" with no "Samsung" to be seen.

etrevino 10y ago
Is that because of longstanding racial animosity or some other reason?
- kalleboo 10y ago
  Well that, and financial competitiveness. Samsung and LG have been eating Sony/Panasonic/Toshiba/etc's lunch the past decade.

matwood 10y ago

It's certainly not the end of Samsung. It may be the end of the Note brand, but they will make more phones and people will buy them.

jhatax 10y ago

If this were the case, VW would surely have abandoned ship and shuttered their factories. They haven't. Similar situation with BP - they are not in the doldrums. People have short-term memories and will vote with their wallets if they see a new product that seems "worth the cost" of ownership.

mschuster91 10y ago
> If this were the case, VW would surely have abandoned ship and shuttered their factories. They haven't. 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.

pasbesoin 10y ago

Wiping out a quarter of their mobile division's profits is hardly going to do them in. (The last guestimate I saw as to the cost of this.)

Zikes 10y ago

There was a time when people in the US died from randomly poisoned Tylenol, yet today it's the go-to OTC pain relief medicine in America.

sib 10y ago
Right, but it's pretty significant that it was Samsung who produced the exploding phones, while it was a criminal who tampered with perfectly good Tylenol pills. I'm sure that Samsung would take less of a hit if there were an individual who was attached small explosives to Galaxy Note devices.

tomjen3 10y ago

A creative marketing agency could totally spin that the phone was so packed with power that it couldn't work, but this new shiny thing is even better and completely safe. 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?

levelist_com 10y ago

As a person that owns both a Samsung Washer & Dryer (they just did a recall on top load washers I believe), a Samsung Refrigerator, and at one point a Samsung television, I can assure you all of their products (that I have owned or currently own) are poorly designed, and more so, poorly manufactured garbage. I will never knowingly buy a Samsung product again. I replaced the TV after it came out about their efforts to track user behavior, etc.. The TV and its apps were garbage anyhow. Stay away from Samsung. 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.

eric_h 10y ago
I'm quite happy with my Samsung TV - picture quality is great. 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.
- woobar 10y ago
  If you don't mind me asking - how did you assert the quality of the picture? Did you use professional calibration or run some tests yourself?
  - eric_h 10y ago
    Haha, certainly nothing so scientific. The picture just looks good to me, and compared with other TVs that I saw on display it was better than a number of the other options that were both cheaper and more expensive.
- dawnerd 10y ago
  Except you can't fully disable ads unless they've patched it in the last 6 or so months. I had a very long back and forth with them about it and they kept denying it until finally admitting that it was impossible to disable. Worse, they were using the notification bar to advertise gamefly. Not cool. Keep in mind the TV I had was their flagship first gen 4k tv. There's no excuse for putting ads on a nearly 5k dollar tv.

adventured 10y ago

> it could be the end of Samsung 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.

abysmallyideal 10y ago

They're estimated to have to have to pay over (or have losses of) $5 billion! The class action lawsuits haven't even started yet, and you bet your ass InQTel, Facebook, Apple shell corps are going to be funding those lawsuits to the billions if it goes there. 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...