Beleaguered Samsung cuts staff and reduces R&D spending
“According to electronic disclosure data provided on Jan. 28 by the Financial Supervisory Service, Samsung Electronics staff numbers stood at 98,557 as of 3Q15 in the wake of restructuring efforts last year. The number, down by 1,000 positions from the year before, is now expected to drop further,” Lee Jeong-hun reports for The Hankyoreh. “‘What can we do? The company is in trouble,’ said a senior Samsung executive recently.”
“Research and development spending dipped from 14.39 billion won (US$11.9 million) to 13.71 billion won (US$11.4 million),” Lee reports. “‘Since Lee Jae-yong took over, [Samsung Electronics’] interest has solely been in buying up companies that it can take advantage of,’ said a Seoul National University professor who asked not to be identified. ‘Because of failures within Samsung itself, they’ve neglected to build their own basic competitiveness through experience,’ the professor added.”
MacDailyNews Take: Presumably, the Seoul National University professor asked not to be identified because he/she preferred his/her legs not be broken by the thieving chaebol.
So, Samsung has an R&D budget? What for?
What a joyless, horrid existence to have to slave away at place where you wait around to see what Apple does and then kill yourself trying to knock it off as quickly as possible like a soulless automaton. Such an unrewarding, embarrassing, and miserable existence it must be to work at beleaguered Samsung.
Regardless, leave it to the slavish copier to fail to copy Apple during their existential crisis.
We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time. — Steve Jobs, August 2008
Innovation has always been the reason behind our success and we remain committed to making the best products in the world and expanding the Apple experience to change our customer’s lives in better and more meaningful ways. We’ve invested through economic uncertainty in the past and we’ve always come out stronger on the other side. In fact, some of the most important breakthrough products in Apple’s history were born as a result of investing through the downturn. We’ve also seen these times as opportunities to invest in new markets, just as we’re doing now in areas such as India and other emerging markets… We continue to invest confidently in our future… [On R&D] we’re continuing to invest without pause. We have some great things in the pipeline and we very much believe strongly in investing through downturns. – Apple CEO Tim Cook, January 26, 2016
Hey, Samsung, ignore those two quotes and stay warm and toasty now, ya hear?
