Handheld Device War
Both Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics consider the Mobile World Conference (MWC) 2013,” known as the world’s largest-scale mobile communication exhibition, as an important opportunity to position themselves as the global leaders.
Participating in the MWC 2013, President of Samsung Electronics IT & Mobile Communications (IM) Shin Jong-kyun Shin said, “Galaxy S4 will be unveiled in New York on March 14. I cannot say about details at the moment, but I’m sure it’s very excellent,” along with expressing the will to catch up with Apple this year by growing its table PC business doubled than last year.
President Shin said like that on February 24 (local time) at a press conference held at the venue of the MWC event in Barcelona, Spain. It was the first mention that had officially confirmed the time for debut of Samsung’s strategic smartphone “Galaxy S4,” still cloaked in secrecy. In truth, Samsung’s Galaxy S 4 has drawn much attention from the market creating many rumors. The latest rumor is that the product uses eight-core chips for application processor (AP). It appears that Samsung intends to maximize the “Galaxy S4 effect” by having the sole debut ceremony for its latest version of Galaxy S series in New York, known as Apple’s home.
Shin added, “We will leap forward in the tablet PC market, too, based on our leading position in the global smart phone market. This year, we expect to boost sales of table PCs to more than double over last year through our new product Galaxy Tab 8.0. The global IT market is still shrunk but the tablet PC market is expected to grow more than 50% this year. With Galaxy Tab 8.0 representing the integration of our years-long technology and knowhow, we believe we will be able to upgrade our position in the tablet PC market.”
According to Shin, in 2013, Samsung aims to sell more than twice as many tablet PCs as it sold last year. Given that a major market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) estimated Samsung’s sales of tablet PCs for 2012 at 17.74 million units, the company’s goal for 2013 stands at a minimum of 30 million units.
President Shin said Samsung will create new kinds of success stories and markets by applying the smartphone’s DNA of success to B2B transactions, contents businesses and service sectors. Especially, given that using smartphones at work is becoming a new trend, Samsung plans to actively make inroads into the B2B market. “We concentrated on the B2C market until last year, so our position in the B2B market was relatively week. This year, we will put emphasis on the B2B market, too,” said Shin.
In this regard, Samsung released “KNOX,” a new security solution dedicated to Android OS-based industrial systems, on the same day. This makes it easy to manage one mobile device both for the personal and business purposes. For example, you can install the business-purpose software onto your personal mobile device. KNOX ensures powerful protection against information leaks, viruses and hacking. KNOX-mounted devices will be launched after the second quarter of this year.
On the other hand, President Shin answered the question about introduction of voice LTE (VoLTE)-supported devices, saying “We don’t have any plan for now. We think both of LTE and 3G will co-exist for a certain period of time.”