Samsung isn’t doing as well as they’re used to lately, the company has faced a drop in profits this year and have started re-structuring certain parts of their business in order to get back on track. Samsung has released a Galaxy Alpha handsets a few months back and by doing that started using metal in its products. Several other phones followed the Galaxy Alpha, including Samsung’s well-known phablet, Galaxy Note 4. It is also rumored that the Galaxy S6 handset will be a big step up compared to the Galaxy S5, not just an iterative update to its predecessor. All of this sounds promising, but there’s a good reason why Samsung started making those steps. As I said, they experienced a drop in profits this year through several quarters.
Samsung’s mobile chief, J.K. Shin, earned 680 million Korean won ($630,000) in the 3rd quarter this year, which is less than half of the 1.7 billion won ($1.5 million) he earned in Q2 this year. This is actually a great example of Samsung’s current state. J.K. Skin is still making tons of money, but that’s a huge difference compared to the previous quarter. In the third quarter this year, Samsung reported a 60% drop in net profit compared to the same period last year, again, a huge difference. Samsung is still very much turning a profit and is still a number one OEM in the world, but this information is really discouraging. Samsung’s stock price dropped 14% this year and the biggest issue is Samsung’s mobile division, J.K. Shin’s mobile division that is. Samsung lost market share all over the world, mainly because of low-cost competitors like Xiaomi, who is currently the number 1 vendor in China and 3rd in the world.
As I said, Samsung is still pretty much a profitable company, an extremely profitable company that is. Samsung’s 47.45 trillion won ($43 billion) revenue in the third quarter this year is almost 3 times bigger than Google’s. Samsung earned 4.22 trillion won ($4.3 billion) in net profit, which is just insane. These numbers clearly show that Samsung has nothing to worry about here, they just need to find the right path as far as mobile division goes and get back on track. Different people have different ideas on what that path should look like, let’s see what Samsung’s vision is and how will they fare in the near future.