The Samsung Reshuffle
Yesterday, Samsung announced an organizational reshuffle as part of its annual personnel appointments. This is a yearly ritual by the korean company in a bid to make sure their leadership do not become complacent in their current roles. One Important position change is Jong Kyun Shin, executive in charge of Samsung’s mobile division, will now be the head of the overall mobile division focusing on the long term strategy and also new business growth.
Shin will move away from the day-to-day mobile activities which will now be taken over by Dong Jin Koh, who oversaw the development of Tizen, Samsung Pay and Knox enterprise mobile security platform. Koh was also involved in the development of the Galaxy Note 5 and S6 smartphones, and will take the leadership of the mobile division’s research and development, product planning, design, manufacturing and sales and marketing functions.
“Based on Koh’s career background, it suggests Samsung will put more weight on its software focus instead of hardware,” said Greg Roh, an analyst interviewed by Bloomberg.
Samsung faces many challenges in the mobile market with increased competition from Android manufacturers and Apples iOS in the high end Smartphone, and also Chinese manufacturers in the low end and mid-range phones.
What does this mean to Tizen?
These changes suggest that Samsung would like to focus more on software & services and we can see how Tizen, as a multi-platform OS, can be used to provide these services. Samsung makes some great hardware and there is a need create a unique selling point to help distinguish them from the competition, running Android on everything is just not an option.
In the coming months / years we will see how these changes translate to movements on the ground, but no-one know how these changes will play out, as the long-term strategy is still being decided and evaluated at every possible turn. However, Koh understands Tizen and great things can be achieved by having the full support of Shin as the long-term planner.
