It is no secret that Samsung’s smartphone division is suffering a decline. Its decline in the Asia-Pacific region, which was earlier its forte, suggests that Samsung Corp. has to reinvigorate its devices to retain the market share. Industry experts have suggested both, change in the design and technology perspective and its pricing strategy, to change the direction of winds for Samsung. On the contrary, Apple has captured a lot of market where Samsung has lost it. And with other companies like Xiaomi, LG, Asus, Micromax, etc. offering awe striking features for less, Samsung’s crown is in jeopardy.
But it seems like Samsung has adopted a new strategy to maintain a healthy growth in its revenues, which was earlier reported to suffer first decline in last three years. South Korean giant Samsung has revealed its plans to invest heavily in its display division. It is all set to invest about 4 trillion WON (about $3.6 billion) for manufacturing of OLED (organic light-emitting diode) displays. Company said that it will invest this amount over the period of next three years i.e., spreading it between 2015 to 2017.
Samsung officials said that these investments will be focused to manufacture display units for medium and small screen consumer electronics devices like smartphones and tablets. Analysts have speculated that these production units will initially produce curved display panels for Galaxy Note Edge. But it can be strongly assumed that in long run, Samsung can start producing units for other companies with no production capabilities of their own. However, LG too has reported to invest about 1 trillion WON (about $900 million) in its OLED manufacturing division. But LG said to focus more on developing TV displays for now. This certainly can be considered as a future threat to Samsung’s plans.
Samsung is already following this strategy with its semiconductor division. It has been reported that Apple will be relying heavily on Samsung’s chip manufacturing plants for their next generation A9 processors. Following such strategy has proved golden to Samsung, as its semiconductor division reported a healthy profit amidst an overall decline.
Also Samsung has been working on its own series of processors, Exynos, for its smartphones. With its star devices equipped with Exynos processors, Samsung is cutting on its reliance on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor. This will help in boosting the revenue and also aid in designing a new and much needed pricing strategy for its devices. Similar to its speculated plans with the OLED displays, Exynos processors too can be seen featured in third party devices in future. This would give Samsung another root in the market to hold on to. Giving support to these speculation are reports about Samsung focusing on semiconductor division with heavy investments.
So with Apple invading Samsung’s territory, Samsung’s semiconductor division gaining grounds and now its plans to grow the OLED manufacturing department, it becomes evident that Samsung is girding its loins to prepare for coming times. Only this time, rather than only relying on its smartphone division, it is expanding on other sectors too. It would certainly be interesting to see the future of Apple-Samsung relationship and Samsung teaming up with other giants to sustain its grounds and maintain its leverage above others.
The iPhone Help
The iPhone Help