‘Different Atmosphere’ At Samsung Town Hall Meeting
Samsung Electronics mobile business chief Roh Tae-moon has addressed workers and managers at a 2pm town hall meeting at the company’s Suwon plant, claiming that “Galaxy has led the way into the mobile AI era and has secured values that cannot be bought with money”.
Media reports from Korea say Roh Tae-moon told workers yesterday he was positive about the latest flagship Galaxy S24 driving up the company’s overall smartphone business in 2024.
Samsung debuted its on-device AI, called Galaxy AI, for the Galaxy S24 series, at the start of 2024. Preorders reached 1.21 million units in the first week of the launch, Korea Herald reported.
In July Samsung’s new foldable phones, Galaxy Z Fold6 and Galaxy Z Flip6, were unveiled.
Samsung announced on Thursday it will start adding four more languages to Galaxy AI – Turkish, Dutch, Swedish and Romanian – in coming weeks. Existing supported languages will also expand to cover additional dialects in traditional Chinese and Portuguese.
Maeil Newspaper Korea reported that while there was nothing odd about having a town hall meeting, “the atmosphere is quite different this year”.
“This is because there are a lot of internal and external negative factors, such as the overall crisis of the company due to sluggish semiconductors, which are its main business, and worsening profitability of the MX [Mobile Experience] sector.”
Korea Herald says Samsung is “speeding up efforts for the wider adoption of Galaxy AI in an apparent attempt to widen the gap with its archrival Apple, which has delayed the launch of its AI model, Apple Intelligence, to October.”
It says that as of September about 20 million units of Samsung’s 30 smartphone models feature Galaxy AI.
Meanwhile, Korean site SE Daily is reporting that Samsung has started the development of the Exynos 2700 chipset that will power the Galaxy S27.
The chipset has been given the codename Ulysses it promises to provide gains in performance and reduce energy consumption.
SE Daily was forthright in its assessment, according to an English translation: “[Samsung’s] System LSI (Large Scale Integration) division in charge of chip design is in dire need of restoring its pride. This is because the performance gap between Exynos and its competitor Qualcomm’s chipset, the Snapdragon, is widening, and recently released Exynos products are suffering humiliation.
“The Exynos 2500, which is in the final stages of development for the Galaxy S25, which is scheduled to be released in early 2025, is facing yield and performance issues, making it unclear whether it will be included in the S25.”
The site said the project would begin “in earnest” at the end of this year.
Although Samsung is a hugely profitable company, it revealed in early October that it would would not meet profit expectations for its third quarter in 2024.