Samsung: A Brief Overview

Samsung is one of the world's largest and well known consumer electronics company. It is actually a conglomerate made up of different companies in many industries, from construction to insurance, from retail outlets to sports teams. The electronic company is a part of this wider group of companies, and is the part devoted to manufacturing and marketing cell and smartphones.

The company was originally a small trading company dealing in import of various dry goods. The communist invasion forced a relocation and, essentially, starting the business all over again, but ironically it was also the catalyst which leads to the company?s first boom in business, paving the way for its eventual rise as a global conglomerate. After the Korean War, they acquired a sugar refinery that was the only one in the country at the time and further diversified the company's holdings and assets, with a presence in a wide range of industries. By the early 1970s, the company was even launching mass media operations in radio and television.

The company, however, was favored by successive regimes in South Korea and enjoyed official protection for most of its history. Special privileges were set aside for it to flourish, as part of the official policy of incubating Korean industry. The economic strategy chosen was to nurture a few select companies into major economic giants, multinational conglomerates. To that end, the chaebols, of which the company was one had special conditions created to ensure their success, such as heavily subsidized loans and the requirement that foreign companies hand over technological secrets in order to do any business at all in South Korea. This was justified on the theory that Korean businesses needed a ?leg up? in order to reach the stage where they can compete meaningfully with much more established global powers. This is how the company first broke into the memory chip industry. By the late 1980s, however, the organization was sufficiently invested in research and development to produce technology of their own from scratch, and this pushed them into the forefront of the global electronics industry. By the early 1990s, they were designing, manufacturing, and shipping a wide variety of professional and consumer electronics worldwide, with facilities across the globe.

It was during the 1990s that they became a truly global corporation, and it was during this decade that its reputation as cellular telephone company was started. The company continues to make products and introduce advancements everyday.