Yesterday, Samsung invited around five hundred executives from eight of its business divisions to a global strategy meeting. These executives were from its ten regional holding, device solutions, consumer, mobile and electronics divisions. The purpose of the meeting is for the business to create the holistic approach of Samsung Electronics’ strategies for 2016. Here at the meeting, delegates are discussing current local business conditions and work through ideas for marketing strategies for new products destined to arrive in 2016. We understand that Samsung has already showed an outline of 2016’s products and two areas of focus are for the mobile business to business market and mobile System-on-Chips. However, the Samsung Pay mobile cardless payment system and the Tizen OS platform are also areas where the business is seeking to concentrate on.
We have already seen individual Samsung divisions and electronics discussing their plans for 2016, including the launch of a new automotive technology division and how Samsung are planning to release a “bioprocessor” System-on-Chip, which appears to be structured around application processor cores paired up with environment and biometric measuring sensors. These chipset designs are likely to find a home in next generation wearable devices and activity monitors, where their closely integrated design should result in battery life improvements. The next Galaxy S flagship model, the Galaxy S7, is expected to use the Samsung Exynos 8 Octa chipset in at least one market: perhaps Samsung are planning to open up their flagship System-on-Chips to competitors, because to date only a limited number of other manufacturers have used an Exynos chipset in their designs.
Samsung have faced a difficult few years. Some Samsung products have performed exceptionally well, such as the SUHD television set, which is now the world’s top selling television for a decade, but some product lines – such as the high end flagship models – have not sold as well as perhaps Samsung hoped for. In the mobile and Android sphere, the business faces stiff competition from the Chinese device manufacturers such as Huawei and Xiaomi, which offer comparable hardware that undercuts on price, and from Apple, which offers comparable hardware with a higher price tag but (arguably) a better image.