Samsung in a Global Market

¶ … Samsung in a Global Market After generations of morphing from farming to T.V.s, Samsung was on the verge of complete ruin in the 1990's during the Asian Financial Crisis. The company was an estimated $15 billion dollars in debt and was forced to liquidate both assets and thousands of employees. However, the company began to implement more globalizing strategies, which in the end help save it.

Kun Hee Lee, SEC Chairman, focused his efforts globalizing Samsung through his "new management initiative." During this time, Lee set an example of long-term growth followed with continual investment in "innovative, premium products and brand value." One of the riskiest strategies used by Samsung to maintain its "brand value," was its devotion towards keeping production in house. With this, they could promise their consumers the quality necessary for an advanced technology market. At the turn of the Twenty-first century, Samsung had invested billions of dollars in new production factories.

Another major focus of Samsung was keeping a tight leash on its hardware focus. Rather than deviating into more of a software focus, as the companies competitors had done, Samsung maintained a difference approach was is now negatively affecting the strategy of maintaining the top diversified products in a global market. As the market turned towards a software focus, Samsung's stance was threatened.

As Sony, Samsung's main competitor, pulls in billions of dollars of profits from its software and entertainment investments, such as the Playstation 1, 2, and 3, Samsung is left to appeal only to a hardware consumer market. One major problem, is that this leaves out billions of dollars in potential market which drives much of consumerism. The software behind the entertainment market began to pay off much more than the hardware components, despite such huge sellers as the LCD T.V. And video cell phones.

However, this hardware focus did pay off later in the cell-phone market, and Samsung was one of the top produces of hi-tech cell-phones and PDAs which was only exemplified with the companies transfer to digital technology over analog. Another major problem seen in this case is the issue that the majority of mangers within Samsung did not view marketing as an important key tool in the effort to fulfill the company's global strategies. However, this was slowly changed as a new marketing system was put into place within the company.

Yet, this strategy took several years to fully infiltrate the minds of the managers in Samsung, who were only convinced after being shown real results from the new marketing strategy, and the lack of faith in this new marketing system proved how much work would be needed to finally internalize it. These problems have plagued Samsung's goal of catching up with major competitors such as Sony.

They are not the only issues by far; however, the issues of remaining out of the software industry as well as the hardship faced at the inception of adopting new marketing strategies proved to help hinder the company from its global goals. Samsung.