Samsung is a huge company that employs roughly 350,000 people. They got to their dominant position by investing in technology that would let them expand into new fields, their most successful bet being the memory chips that are inside everything from your mobile phone to the solid state drive in your new laptop. This year the South Korean firm plans on investing a record breaking $41.4 billion into areas such as processor manufacturing and OLED display production. Analysts polled by Retuers say that this year may very well be the first year that Samsung spends more money investing in areas other today’s cash cow, those previously mentioned memory chips. Now earlier this week we published a report saying that Samsung was going to issue overseas bonds for the first time since 1997 to finance the expansion of their processor factory in Austin, Texas. Said factory is dedicated to making chips for Apple devices, specifically the Apple A5. With that in mind, we want to pose the question: Is Samsung growing because Apple is growing or is Samsung growing because the entire market for smartphones is growing?
If you look at the smartphone market as a whole, Android is obviously a huge success, but who actually ships a majority of those Android devices? It’s Samsung. That gives them a lot of power over the future direction of the mobile industry. They could easily change their mind about Google’s OS and go all out on adopting Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. Even worse, they could try and shove Bada down our throats. But there’s more to the story that software. Not all of Samsung’s investment is being spent on building processor factories, there’s roughly $6.1 billion that will be poured into OLED production. If Samsung can ship an HDTV this year that comes in at less than $10,000 and has a 55 inch OLED display, how long until your next laptop, smartphone, and even your microwave, have an OLED display?
Something to think about.
[Via: Boy Genius Report]