Samsung’s new product announcements show record R&D spending — but it may not translate to market-ready products (SSNLF)

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South Korean electronics giant Samsung is plowing ahead with a range of updates to product lines in its mobile and connected home space and planning iterations on its devices — including some that haven’t been released yet. Samsung Revenue Driven By IT, Memory Business

While the company’s research efforts seem to be translating over to these new and upcoming products, the issues that have accompanied them could highlight problems translating from R&D to prototypes and eventually to actual products. 

Here’s where Samsung is going with new products:

  • It’s expanding its 5G lineup beyond flagship devices for the first time. The Samsung Galaxy A90 5G will be the company’s first smartphone that’s not part of its flagship Galaxy S or Galaxy Note lineups to offer connectivity via the next-generation wireless standard. The phone is on sale in South Korea today, and will be available in the UK and other countries afterward, though it’s unclear if Samsung will offer the device in the US. While not a flagship device, the A90 5G is still a premium device — it uses the same Snapdragon 855 SoC as Samsung’s flagships, and is expected to sell for 900,000 won ($740). This is likely the company’s first step toward spreading 5G throughout its lineup as a standard part of its connectivity package.
  • The company has reopened preregistration for its delayed Galaxy Fold, while reports also claim it’s preparing a follow-up foldable phone for early next year. Its first foray into the novel folding form factor was rushed to the market, Samsung Electronics CEO DJ Koh admitted earlier this summer, and the company was forced to push it back after reviewer units started failing prior to its consumer release. Samsung now believes it’s found an engineering solution to the problem of dust and debris infiltrating the folding hinge, and it looks poised to redouble its commitment to experimentation with the folding form factor with a clamshell-style device set for next year, likely to be far cheaper than the nearly $2,000 Galaxy Fold.
  • And it purportedly started a beta testing program in South Korea for a smaller version of its still-unreleased Galaxy Home smart speaker. This testing period suggests Samsung’s Galaxy Home Mini would follow quickly on the heels of the Galaxy Home — pricing for the larger device, which was first announced last summer and is supposed to be released sometime this quarter, still hasn’t been revealed. A smaller smart speaker could give Samsung a device to better compete with the likes of the Amazon Echo Dot and Google Home Mini.

The bigger picture: Samsung has been pouring money into research, but it’s not clear that the other elements of the company that put that innovation investment into practice are equipped to keep up.

Samsung’s R&D expenditure in the first half of 2019 was $8.4 billion, its highest ever for a half-year period, according to Yonhap News Agency. And while the fruits of this research probably haven’t come close to a production line yet, the electronics giant has been experiencing issues in trying to move to new form factors and expanding into product categories like the smart speaker.

Its innovations to core mobile devices, though, have apparently gone well, as the flagship Galaxy S and Galaxy Note lineups have seen successful rollouts while Samsung adds technology from them into the rest of its mobile arsenal.

But with smartphone sales on the decline globally, there’s limited growth to come from improving its position in that space. Nearly any new smartphone customer has to be won over from a competitor, rather than from a pool of nonusers, so there’s a higher cost.

That’s why Samsung has been looking to expand to markets like the smart home, wearables, and super-premium handsets like its foldable phones. The company should continue to try to find its next big hit beyond the smartphone market, but it also needs to ensure that it’s positioned to keep up with what its R&D teams are churning out.

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