Samsung

"On the other hand, Japan's business model was of a 'vertically integrated' type, where manufacturers assembling the final product co-develop and produce with parts manufacturers. However, they have become unable to compete in terms of cost with the business models of Apple and Samsung, which aim for massive scale with overwhelming network scale."

"Everybody says they obviously want to find the best television they can within their price bracket. They’d answer all these questions as if they were hyper-logical, they’d say that obviously if this thing costs less than the iPad, and it’s better, then they’ll buy it. Then reality comes into it, and actually, the reason they buy the iPad is that they know that every time they get out the Samsung, all their friends will say: “why did you get that, why didn’t you buy the iPad?” and that this will bring with it a little burst of anxiety and a little burst of effort. Never, never underestimate the importance of that. If you buy a Ford or you buy a BMW or a Volkswagen and it breaks down a lot, it’s Ford’s fault, and you and all your friends will go: “golly you’re really unlucky you bought that new Ford and the clutch plate’s gone, bloody hell, I do feel sorry for you”, and you will get a degree of sympathy from your friends, okay? If you go and buy an Alfa Romeo and the clutch plate goes, deep down all your friends are thinking: “what does he expect, he goes and buys an Alfa Romeo, what the hell does he expect?” If you’re going to buy this flash, weird Italian car, it’s going to break down."

"“In South Korea, Samsung has something called the ‘119 Campaign.’ When employees socialize, it’s only for the first round of drinks. Only one type of alcoholic drink is allowed. And everything is done by 9 p.m. In Korea, mixing soju and beer is sometimes called a “bomb.” What it means to “stick to one kind of alcohol” is basically: don’t mix drinks. At our company, we rarely mix drinks, so we decided that social gatherings would only go as far as the first round, and end by 10 p.m."

"China leads the world in deploying ultrahigh-voltage transmission lines, high-speed rail, and 5G networks. Chinese manufacturers make machine tools—die-casting machines, steel presses, robotic arms—that approach German and Japanese levels of quality. They’ve muscled out most other Asian competitors on consumer electronics. Phone makers like Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi tapped into the worker and component ecosystem that Apple helped to build. In 2025, the world’s largest phone makers are Apple, Samsung, and a half dozen Chinese firms that concentrate on sales to developing countries."

"Currently, BYD owns two major industry groups: IT and automobiles. Its main customers are top-tier international communication industry clients such as Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung. As a global leader in secondary rechargeable battery manufacturing, BYD's IT and electronic components industry has covered all core components and assembly business of mobile phones, with market shares of nickel batteries, lithium batteries for mobile phones, and mobile phone keypads leading globally."

"RIM capitulated to pressure for more choice by opening its e-mail system to other handset makers. They would design keyboard phones, and RIM would supply software and links to connect the phones to its data network. In exchange RIM charged licensing fees. RIM called this new program BlackBerry Connect. Many employees couldn’t understand why RIM was rushing to aid competitors. It wasn’t. Like some Balsillie strategies, appearances were deceiving. Balsillie and a small team of executives had other ambitions for Connect. This was more than a licensing program; it was a Trojan horse. RIM’s long-term game was to buy time. Competitors who signed up with RIM would be preoccupied making BlackBerry Connect phones rather than creating their own rival e-mail service. RIM gained an inside peek at rivals’ long-term development plans and opened the door to new customers. Every enterprise customer signed up under the program represented another stream of service access fees for RIM. It wasn’t empowering competitors at all; it was locking in its lead. “Sometimes you have to disguise yourself as another animal in the forest,” says Tyler Nelson, a RIM vice president who ran the program. Lazaridis was initially concerned that Connect would distract RIM’s engineers and designers at a time when RIM was racing to keep up with demand and introduce new BlackBerrys. He never worried, however, that corporate customers would abandon RIM for the Connect phones offered by other handset makers. Their Connect phones could not hope to match the security and encryption protections that made BlackBerry such a valuable business communications tool. “We knew ultimately that the enterprise customer … was never going to go for it, because it was not a verifiably secure solution,” he says. “It was our advantage. It wasn’t hidden; it was in plain sight.” Unaware of RIM’s hidden agenda, phone makers in Europe and Asia flocked to the program to strengthen their presence in North America with BlackBerry-enabled phones. Samsung was so keen to make a Connect phone that one of its employees idled for weeks at a Waterloo hotel waiting for RIM to grant him a meeting with Balsillie. Finally the visitor appeared at the company’s offices in a distraught state. Samsung, he explained, would not let him return home to his family and job in South Korea unless he secured a Connect deal. RIM opened Connect discussions with Samsung, and the manager was free to fly home. RIM’s most dedicated Connect partner was Nokia. The Finnish phone maker had been trying to break into the U.S. wireless business market for years, and Connect looked like an easy shortcut. Nokia’s executives did not worry about dancing with a competitor because Balsillie played down RIM’s ambitions during initial discussions in 2002. “He emphasized he didn’t believe RIM would be able to compete in the hardware business [and] might even give up their hardware business,” says Panu Kuusisto, who managed Nokia’s Connect agreement with RIM.…"

"Cook, often asked how he feels about all this, has suggested Apple is some kind of change agent. “Your choice is, do you participate? Or do you stand on the sideline and yell at how things should be?” Cook said in 2017. “My own view—very strongly—is you show up and you participate. You get in the arena. Because nothing ever changes from the sideline.” But White says Cook isn’t participating so much as being used—like when he accepted, in October 2019, a role as chairman of the advisory board at the Beijing-based Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management. “The role that they want Tim Cook to play is Useful Puppet, one that they can use for propaganda purposes,” she says. In her view, Samsung operates at a considerable business disadvantage because South Korea is a democracy with NGOs, trade unions, and a vibrant press that, for instance, has interviewed grieving parents after some workers developed leukemia from working in factories. “Apple doesn’t have any of that possible pressure,” White says. “Apple actually has a government that prevents all of those key stakeholders in society from writing an article or appearing on television. They can’t even protest.”"

"Apple’s ecosystem was being wildly underestimated. Whether it was the way its products synced content across devices or locked the consumer in, the company’s dual control of hardware and software acted as a protective moat from the onslaught of new competitors. Investors worried that cheap Chinese handsets would emerge as a massive threat—but they were more of a threat to Samsung’s dominance, not Apple’s. While Samsung, relying on Android, struggled to differentiate its phones and would see its sales in China plummet, Apple’s narrow focus on the high end paid off. In hindsight, Apple’s share price and media image were suffering for all the wrong reasons in 2013. The company *was* facing an existential threat—but it wasn’t from Android; it was from Beijing."

"Through this lens, it wasn’t difficult to see why Samsung had attained best-in-class marks. The Korean giant had dozens of formal partners, its own multibillion-dollar manufacturing sites, and formal joint ventures going back decades that allowed Chinese partners to “capture” technical know-how. Samsung had prominently recognized the importance of China early on and had expanded from low-skilled production to cutting-edge chip fabrication. Apple had no formal joint ventures, did not engage in tech transfer, and operated in the shadows. Before 2012, when Apple came under pressure to publish a document listing its main suppliers, few people had any idea which factories supplied it with components."

"O’Marah recognized that Apple’s strategy was brilliant. It accounted for why the company was running circles around the competition, turning revered companies like Nokia and BlackBerry into case studies of strategic failure. But it had one major flaw. Whereas smartphone rivals like Samsung could bolt a bunch of off-the-shelf components together and make a handset, Apple’s strategy required it to become ever more wedded to the industrial clusters forming around its production. As more of that work took place in China, with no other nation developing the same skills, Apple was growing dependent on the very capabilities it had created."

"The Apple-Samsung partnership was more intimate than is widely known. The Korean company even had separately badged engineers working full time at Apple’s Infinite Loop campus, on the bottom floor of De Anza 3. The top two floors housed Apple’s semiconductor team, led by Johny Srouji, a chips savant who’d worked at IBM and Intel before Apple hired him in 2008. The two companies jointly worked on the design of the subsequent iPhone chips, so when Samsung then copied the iPhone with an Android-enabled device, Apple wanted to distance itself."

"Hard-liners in Beijing had viewed Apple as an exploitative power because through their conventional lens, it looked that way. Samsung had several dozen formal partnerships in the country; Apple had none. Samsung had its own manufacturing plants; Apple had none. But Guthrie’s argument turned this logic on its head. He emphasized that Apple was embedding its top engineers into more than 1,600 factories, making a few dozen partnerships look paltry. The difference was that the likes of Intel and Samsung were trumpeting their joint ventures and investments in the country, while Apple was silent. Worse, Apple was allowing Foxconn to take credit for all manner of investments that ultimately traced back to iPhone and iPad demand."