Samsung Strategy Case Study
Key Learning Outcomes
By the end of the case, students should be able to:
- Understand the broad macro-environment of Samsung and the global smartphone industry in terms of political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal factors (PESTEL/PEST/STEEPLE).
- Use our swot analysis example to gain an overall understanding of Samsung's strengths and weaknesses and strategic options arising from the opportunities and threats that have been identified from the Pestle analysis example on it's business environment.
- To apply strategy business models and frameworks such as Pestle/Pest/Steeple, Swot etc to real company cases.
Analyse the macro environment of Samsung and the smartphone industry using Pestle followed by a Samsung Swot Analysis
- See also, Samsung Porters Five Forces 2018
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Samsung is a South Korean company with its headquarters in Samsung town, Seoul. It mainly deals with the design, manufacture, and marketing of smartphones, tablets, microchips, laptops, washing machines, among others. Founded in 1938 by Lee Byung-chull as a trading company and later developed into a big business empire. Samsung has many subsidiaries such as Samsung electronics, Samsung heavy industry, Samsung life insurance, among others. It is one of the largest businesses in South Korea producing approximately 5th of the country’s total exports mainly electronics, heavy industry and defense industries (Burris 2018).
Samsung operates in 73 countries worldwide including the USA, UK and China where it has market shares of 29.5%, 35% and 2.2% market shares respectively with major competitor Apple having 45%, 37% and 17.4% market shares respectively (Samsung Newsroom 2018). In 2017, Samsung electronics had a $222.82billion global revenue that was an increase from its $187.74billion revenue in 2016 according to Statista (2018b).