JK Shin, head of Samsung Mobile Communications

Korean vendor Samsung has established itself as the closest thing Nokia has to a challenger in the global mobile handset market, and JK Shin is the man leading the charge.

With a market share hovering just above 19 per cent at the end of the first quarter of 2009 from sales of 51.4 million units, Shin’s approach to the handset market is distinctly promiscuous.

Samsung has a finger in most of the competing operating system pies, allying itself to no one camp in particular. Such a strategy has strengths and weaknesses, of course, depending on your point of view. On the one hand the fi rm should be able to keep pace with whatever is proving popular in the fickle environment of mobile handset design but, on the other, a fragmented approach such as this runs the risk of spreading company focus too thinly.

Its most recently released handset, the Jet, was built on a propietary platform, however, suggesting that Shin doesn’t necessarily believe that industry groupings have all the answers.

Previous Index Next