Strategy Skills Podcast 103: The secretive world of Samsung, the South Korean Tech Giant. With Geoffrey Cain

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An explosive expose of Samsung, one of the biggest and most secretive companies in the world, as the Korean juggernaut battles Apple and Sony to dominate the world of technology. Seen for decades in tech circles as a fast follower rather than an innovation leader, Samsung today has grown to become a market leader in the United States and around the globe. They have captured one quarter of the smartphone market and have been pushing the envelope on every front. In SAMSUNG RISING: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant that Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech, Geoffrey Cain offers a penetrating look behind the curtains of the biggest company nobody in America knows. Forty years ago, Samsung was a rickety Korean agricultural conglomerate that produced sugar, paper, and fertilizer, located in a backward country with a third-world economy. However, with the rise of the PC revolution, Chairman Lee Byung-chul began a bold experiment: to make Samsung a major supplier of computer chips. The multimillion-dollar plan was incredibly risky but Lee, wowed by a young Steve Jobs, who sat down with the Chairman to offer his advice, became obsessed with creating a tech empire. In SAMSUNG RISING, readers follow behind the scenes as the company fought its way to the top of tech. Today, Samsung employs over 300,000 people (compared to Apple’s 80,000 and Google’s 48,000). The company’s revenues have grown more than forty times from that of 1987 and make up more than 20 percent of South Korea’s exports. It is also one of Apple’s chief suppliers of technology critical to the iPhone, while its own Galaxy phone outsells the iPhone. Yet their disastrous recall of the Galaxy Note 7, with numerous reports of phones spontaneously bursting into flames, reveals the dangers of the company’s headlong attempt to overtake Apple at any cost.