Outlines Management Direction at Shareholders' Meeting
Samsung Electronics has selected robots and the metaverse as its new growth drivers. The company's top executive said on March 16 that it would actively foster them through R&D and mergers and acquisitions (M&As).
Han made the remark at the 53rd regular shareholders’ meeting. He summed up the company's three key goals for 2022: reinforcing customer experience innovation based on multiple devices, leadership in premium areas, and bolstering momentum for future growth.
Regarding the strengthening of future growth momentum, Han suggested robots and the metaverse as the answer. “We will expand our growth momentum by discovering new businesses, including the metaverse and robots.”
Samsung is already making progress in the robot business. In 2019, the company introduced the Samsung Bot Care, a care robot for the elderly and the weak. The following year, it unveiled the intelligent companion robot Ballie. It also established a task force for robot commercialization at the end of 2020 and upgraded it to the Robot Business Team at the end of 2021.
Samsung chose robots as a new growth driver because the area has sufficient synergy effects with its current businesses and the robot market is growing fast. The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) predicted that the robot market will grow 32 percent annually and reach about 211 trillion won in 2025.
The metaverse has emerged as a new growth driver. “We are preparing metaverse devices,” Han said earlier at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2022 in Barcelona, Spain, at the end of February. “Metaverse platform devices are a hot issue these days, so please look forward to Samsung’s metaverse products.”
In addition, Han said that the company will aggressively pursue M&As. “We can’t specify timing, but if it helps the company grow and boosts shareholder value, we will put no restrictions on business areas with respect to M&As,” Han said. “We are studying various areas that can offer us new growth drivers.”