Samsung electronics quality issues
Introduction
Samsung Company was founded in 1938 by Lee Byung-Chul, and it has its headquarters in Seoul, South Korea. The company manufactures clothes, motor vehicles, chemicals, consumer electronics, medical equipment, and electronic parts. In the late 1960s, Samsung ventured into the electronics sector, and today, it is the world’s leading manufacturer of electric appliances (Sull, 2015). The company started producing smartphones in the 2000s when it launched the Samsung Galaxy smartphones series, which become the best -selling smartphone in the world. This paper will discuss the quality issues that temporarily halted the production and distribution of the Galaxy Note 7 in 2016, their impact on the industry, and the remedial measures taken by the company.
Description of the quality issue
The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was a smartphone targeting the high-end users that were launched in August 2016. The decision to stop its production was made after consumers blamed the phone for causing a house fire. The phone was also blamed for burning a Jeep car and caused alarm in planes when the devices started emitting smoke mid-air. The decision to stop selling the Galaxy Note 7 was made after the company had announced that it planned to recall more than 2.5 million handsets after initial reports of fires due to battery malfunctioning. According to Loveridge et al. (2018), the batteries overheated and exploded, causing fires. Phones that had been traded in for new ones had faulty batteries that caused fires in the United States.
Samsung tested its phones to establish the root cause of the overheating and subsequent explosion of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 batteries. The findings showed that batteries supplied by two different manufactures had weaknesses. The first set of the cell had faulty negative electrodes in the upper-right corner of the battery, which bent towards the left of the battery (Loveridge et al., 2018). The second set of batteries had short-circuiting when the positive electrode came into contact with the negative electrode due to high welding burrs on the positive electrode. The ever increasing desire by smartphone manufacturers to make slimmer phones with longer batteries may have strained the battery manufacturing process. Battery manufacturers were forced to use a small subset of cells that could quickly overheat and subsequently explode, causing a fire. According to Samsung, mistakes in the design and production of the batteries by the two manufacturers caused the malfunctioning of the cell. The company found out that the batteries in the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 lacked sufficient insulation material. Equally, the design for these batteries did not have adequate space to accommodate the batteries’ electrodes.
The rationale for choosing Samsung
Samsung is a leading manufacturer of high-end mobile phones in the world (Sull, 2015). Therefore, Samsung makes the best choice for this paper because it is interesting to note how the company responded to reports of its Samsung Galaxy Note 7 catching fire due to faulty batteries. As a top manufacturer of smartphones, Samsung acts a yardstick upon which other players in the industry are assessed in terms of quality and customer safety (Yun et al., 2018). Additionally, the reason for choosing Samsung is that this paper sought to unravel how a defective product like the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 got into the market, which puts a spotlight on the significance of an effective quality management system. Samsung makes a reasonable choice because there is a need to understand how the company’s customers and competitors like Apple reacted to the news of the presence of a faulty device in the smartphone market.
Quality management system going forward.
After the quality issues were noted, Samsung put in place a quality assurance system that must be followed by both the company and the manufacturers of the components. To avoid such quality issues arising in the future, the company executed a safety measure framework at the product planning and battery manufacturing stage. According to Jung and Ham (2017), the safety measure framework was established after the company got to the root cause of the problem.
Competitors and customers’ reactions
The news on Samsung Galaxy Note 7’s faulty batteries that overheated and exploded, causing fires shook the smartphone industry. The recall for the defective devices provided competitors like Apple the opportunity to market its iPhone brand. Many industry players, some customers shunned Samsung products due to the quality issues noted in the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 (Atashfaraz & Abadi, 2016). Such customers opted for the competitors’ products, which increased the rivals’ sales and revenue. On the other hand, competitors may have reacted to this news by scaling up their quality management systems to avoid such quality issues in their products. Customers’ reactions must have tilted the industry sales in favor of Samsung’s rivals.
Conclusion
The quality issue witnessed in the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone in 2016 was due to faulty batteries that overheated and exploded, resulting in fires. Samsung retained its position as the leading manufacturer and seller of high-end smartphones after the quality issue of 2016 by implementing product quality and safety measures. The smartphone industry is sensitive to product quality and safety for the users. Therefore, there is a need for industry players like Samsung to have robust quality assurance systems that ensure only the right products reach the market.
References
Atashfaraz, M., & Abadi, M. H. H. S. (2016). Impact of E-Service Innovation on Brand Equality and Customer Loyalty in Samsung International Corporation. Procedia Economics and Finance, 36, 327-335.
Jung, W. J., & Ham, D. H. (2017). Analysis of a New Product Failure by the Use of Root Cause Analysis and Fault Tree Analysis: The Case of Samsung Galaxy Note7. Journal of Digital Convergence, 15(8), 69-83.
Loveridge, M. J., Remy, G., Kourra, N., Genieser, R., Barai, A., Lain, M. J., … & Ellis, M. (2018). Looking deeper into the Galaxy (Note 7). Batteries, 4(1), 3.
Sull, D. (2015). Two tales of one city: Samsung, Daewoo, and lessons on large-scale transformation. Leading Sustainable Change: An Organisational Perspective, 171-195.
Yun, J. J., Jeon, J., Park, K., & Zhao, X. (2018). Benefits and costs of closed innovation strategy: Analysis of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 Explosion and withdrawal scandal. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 4(3), 20.