Samsung's Next Act

摘要

Won-min choi, a painstakingly hip designer in the allout assault that Samsung Electronics is waging on the cell phone market, holds up a handset with teensy twin speakers and Surround Sound. At the press of a button the wail of an oncoming train whistles out of the right speaker, passes over to the left and disappears clown the tracks. He grins: "Cool." Choi, 30, is a sound designer in a design lab in Seoul, one of six that Samsung funds in its relentless quest to overtake Nokia. Ten years ago Samsung was barely a presence in cell phones; it sold only in Korea, and even there it ran a distant second to U.S. invader Motorola. Today the cell phone is to Samsung what the Walkman was to Sony—a slick growth engine and an icon of innovation. Suddenly Samsung is number two worldwide, and it aims to supplant Nokia by 2010. It's a brash boast: Nokia holds a 36% dollar-share of the global $85 billion market, more than twice Samsung's share (13%). But ,. Samsung soars by shunning commodity gadgets and gossamer margins in favor of pricey cell phones with fancy features and fatter profits. Samsung releases a new phone in the U.S. every two weeks. It popularized the PDA phone and was first to equip a cell with an MP3 player. A decade ago Samsung was a lethargic maker of me-too memory chips. Now it's a leader in electronic gadgets, one whose $2.7 billion net income in the first quarter, on revenue of $12 billion, made it the most profitable tech company, ahead of Microsoft, IBM and Intel. Samsung's sales could reach $80 billion in 2009, says Jong-Yong Yun, 60, chief executive. "We're like a snowball that rolled down a big hill," says Kitae Lee, chief of Samsung's cell business, which provides a third of Samsung's sales.