Samsung Swot

1.0 SWOT Analysis

1.1 Strength

Nowadays, Samsung is becoming a global brand. Their products are already well-known over 200 countries. Samsung is developing a wide array of electrical products ranging from mobile phones, tablet, TV/Audio/Video, cameras, home appliances, printers, memory cards and others. Thus, Samsung holds significant market share in most of those product categories.

Samsung invested heavily in technology, product design, and human resources. They are focusing on Research and Development (R&D) which means they priorities investments on scientific talents. Plus, Samsung is leading in terms of innovation and customization as they regularly produced new products every year with new digital technology. Because of this kind of approaches, Samsung enjoys the first mover advantage in terms of introducing advance features especially in LCD television, refrigerator, air conditioner and other appliances.

In the market share of mobile categories, Samsung is placed No.2, just behind Nokia as they are the superior in the innovation of smartphones. Besides that, they are the first brand that introduce the 65k TFT/LCD colour phone, polyphonic ringtones, phones with rotating lens, phones with the thinnest and lightest pad, phones that can synchronized with watch and others.

As the Asian market in in the phase of boom time, Samsung took advantage this situation by setting up manufacturing plant in India, thereby reducing logistics and supply chain costs.

1.2 Weakness

Samsung’s frequently launched a series of smartphones for the past few years which led to “cannibalization”. If the sales of a firms new product is high because of decreasing sales of its existing and established product then we can say that cannibalization has occurred. In brief, we can conclude that the firm is actually eating away its own market. We can take the Samsung smartphone S series as an example. They have introduced Samsung S4 model as a new product in the market replacing the S3 model. Customers who actually want to buy the S3 will buy the S4 as it is the latest products. Thus, they are not really capturing new customers but converting their own customers to a product within their brand. However, if Samsung are able to make a person buy their product when he was planning to buy from other brand, it is not cannibalization.

Thus, in order to avoid cannibalization, new products should not be identified too closely with current products and must targeted with new appeals to different market segments. Plus, Samsung is lacking in product differentiation and most of their affordable products seems to be low quality and not user friendly.

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