Samsung hasn’t had a fantastic year this year, and even dating back to 2014, they haven’t been doing as well as they had in the previous few years. But today we have some great news coming out of the company. This morning they held the grand-opening for their brand new office building in Silicon Valley. The office building is a 1.1-million square foot building, and is the biggest investment in Silicon Valley to date for the company. This comes over 30 years after they opened their initial office building in the San Jose area.
“We are laying the groundwork for a more aggressive pace of growth over the next several decades,” Samsung’s Chief Executive, Dr. Oh-Hyun Kwon stated on Thursday at the Grand Opening ceremony. Samsung has said that this new building will house various research labs dedicated to semiconductors, LEDs as well as displays. It will also house staff in the sales and marketing departments as well as other support areas. So basically, Samsung is moving a little bit of everything in there. But it looks like their mobile team won’t be in there, at least not yet.
Samsung’s US President stated that the move “represents a major milestone as we open our most strategically important Samsung facility in the U.S., and also our biggest investment in Silicon Valley.” Samsung has been in Silicon Valley since 1983, so they aren’t really new to the area. Even though the majority of their offices still reside in South Korea.
While this is a pretty big deal for Samsung and for Silicon Valley, the big news coming out of the South Korean tech giant today is the new Gear VR which was announced this afternoon. Coming in at just $99, and being available for multiple Samsung devices. That makes it a pretty huge deal. We’re looking at a major price drop, as well as one Gear VR unit for all of their flagships. It’s a great idea. However that’s not all, Twitch and Netflix are also coming to Gear VR pretty soon. Samsung is one of the ones pioneering virtual reality right now, along with Google and Oculus. It’ll be exciting to see where virtual reality is in the next few years, or even the next few months.
