Samsung Electronics on Thursday appointed a new head of mobile marketing and named a new chief of its China operations, the South Korean consumer electronics manufacturer announced. The company’s mobile marketing unit will now be led by Choi Kyung-sik who has so far served as Executive Vice President at the Seoul-based firm and was promoted to a new position to revise Samsung’s promotional efforts pertaining to its popular product lineups including TVs, smartphones, and tablets. Choi succeeded Lee Sang-chul who will now be leading the company’s Southeast Asian operations, Samsung said. The tech giant’s new chief of China operations is one Kwon Kye-hyun who’s been tasked with trying to revitalize Samsung’s struggling business in the Far Eastern country where the firm’s smartphones have been underperforming for several years now, steadily losing market share to local competitors.
In a short statement provided to the media following the announcement of the new executive appointments, a company spokesperson said that the South Korean consumer electronics manufacturer will make further management changes later this year, but didn’t provide a timeframe regarding when that may happen. The Seoul-based firm traditionally makes executive changes at the end of the calendar year but hasn’t done so in late 2016 due to its involvement in a major political scandal that resulted in the impeachment of the South Korean President Park Geun-hye and the arrest of the company’s Vice Chairman and heir apparent Jay Y. Lee. While Lee is still under arrest and facing charges of bribery, embezzlement, and hiding proceeds of a criminal act, Samsung’s board now decided to go through with at least some of the changes in an effort to maintain its “organizational metabolism,” the phone maker said, implying that its performance might have gone stale otherwise.
The upcoming top management changes that Samsung is planning to make at a later date will affect the company’s semiconductor division and some other units, the firm’s officials confirmed, without clarifying on the matter. Lee’s trial is currently scheduled to be concluded in the coming weeks, though the initial verdict on the matter will likely be appealed by either Samsung’s Vice Chairman or state prosecutors, industry watchers believe, adding that the case might not be resolved until late 2017.