In the mobile business, it’s not every day you see a major international player running frantic damage control. In other fields, such as retail and food, fat cats pulling themselves out of the fire is a fairly common sight. As a side effect of huge fiascoes being far less common in the tech space and especially in mobile, when they do happen, the implications are deep and wide. For Samsung, the Galaxy Note 7 is essentially dead, and it’s taken their reputation in the mobile world with it. Reports of replacement phones exploding and major retailers and carriers stopping sale was enough to make Samsung give up on the phone and cut their losses, leading to, naturally, huge financial losses and undermined consumer confidence. Rival Apple, of course, couldn’t be happier.
Samsung and Apple always seem to be hashing it out, whether it’s in consumer mindspace, in courtrooms, in the drawing room, or on trade show floors. The demise of the Galaxy Note 7 has been a big win for Apple, even managing to help them bring stock up to the highest levels seen since December of 2015. Between that and the iPhone 7, stock has gone up about 13% since September. Samsung, meanwhile, saw all the good in their stocks that the continued high performance of the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge did burned away by the Galaxy Note 7, with stocks dropping to mid-July levels and only now recovering. To add insult to injury, this comes hot on the heels of a courtroom win for Apple centered around “Quick Links”.
As one would imagine, what Samsung is going through is something that only a huge company could realistically bounce back from, and with the market the way it is, the chance is there for the Google Pixel family, riding on the back of Google’s plan to put multiple millions into marketing them, to win over scared would-be Samsung owners. That number could be pretty large, since recent surveys had about 34% of participants saying that they won’t buy another Samsung device. Stories of Samsung washers flying apart at random on top of isolated cases of other Samsung devices exploding being blown out of proportion have set the internet ablaze with Samsung jokes and memes, and left the company facing what can quite literally be described as a PR dumpster fire. While Samsung will surely rise to their feet again in the near future, it will be interesting to see what ripple effects this has on the market and who, besides Apple, may end up benefiting.