Samsung Porters Five Forces Case Study
Key Learning Outcomes
By the end of the case, students should be able to:
- Use Porters five forces model to analyse an industry on the basis of the five competitive forces.
- Analyse the global smartphone industry and how the five forces have affected Samsung and rival firms and the impact on industry structure, attractiveness, and profitability.
- Understand how Samsung has managed to defend against intense competition and the strategies it uses to create 'blue oceans' that are defensible, helping it capture market share and maintain competitive advantage.
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Samsung is a South Korean company with its headquarters in Samsung town, Seoul. It mainly deals with the design, manufacture, and marketing of smartphones, tablets, microchips, laptops, washing machines, among others. Founded in 1938 by Lee Byung-chull as a trading company and later developed into a big business empire. Samsung has many subsidiaries such as Samsung electronics, Samsung heavy industry, Samsung life insurance, among others. It is one of the largest businesses in South Korea producing approximately 5th of the country’s total exports mainly electronics, heavy industry and defense industries (Burris 2018).
Samsung operates in 73 countries worldwide including the USA, UK and China where it has market shares of 29.5%, 35% and 2.2% market shares respectively with major competitor Apple having 45%, 37% and 17.4% market shares respectively (Samsung Newsroom 2018). In 2017, Samsung electronics had a $222.82billion global revenue that was an increase from its $187.74billion revenue in 2016 according to Statista (2018b).