With the International smartphone market becoming increasingly competitive it’s unsurprising that those at the top of the Android ladder, like Samsung, are suffering. After reporting a 37.5% decline in operating income from Q2 2015, as well as losing the top spot in China, it’s clear that not everything is going swimmingly at Samsung. As such, reports that Samsung were to cut up to as many as 10,000 jobs were unsurprising. According to the company themselves however, this is not the case, and Samsung is not cutting jobs at their headquarters, but rather they are relocating some of these jobs.
The report comes from Koreas YonHap News and states quite clearly that “It will only be relocations of workers” rather than any sort of job cuts. Samsung currently employs 320,000 or so employees across the globe, with 100,000 or so of them housed in South Korea itself, and the report from YonHap says that roughly 1,000 jobs will be relocated, rather than the 10,000 job cuts that we were hearing yesterday. Job cuts are not something that any organization of Samsung’s size takes lightly, and the mass exodus happening at Qualcomm should be an indication of why. Not only is it bad for your reputation, but it’s also bad for business. A strong company is one that people want to work with, not a weak one that has to cut jobs.
It is clear however, that Samsung is no longer the be all and end all of Android that it once was. While it’s dominance here in the West is assured, Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi, Huawei and ZTE are giving them headaches in one of the most important smartphone markets on the globe. In another emerging market, India, Samsung still apparently holds on to the top spot there as well, but are fighting hard with Micromax, and cheaper devices that run more up-to-date software from the likes of YU and Motorola are thorns in Samsung’s side as well. They might not need to cut jobs, but it’s clear Samsung needs to do something if they want to return to their position of absolute dominance.