The Korean tech manufacturer took a big hit to its earnings in 2014, but could their newly launched smart home division reverse the company’s fortunes?
Samsung’s Chief Executive, Boo-Keun Yoon, is on the record saying that the smart home moment will come just as fast and change our lives just as much as the smartphone revolution did a few years ago. Now that Samsung is booting up its smart home division, no doubt the company’s shareholders are hoping that he will be right.
Given that Samsung still has the lion’s share of both the home appliances market and a generous share of the mobile market, smart homes should be a natural fit for Samsung. With the global smart home market predicted to grow once again this year, there’s more than enough potential profits in this sector to compensate for the companies falling mobile sales.
Samsung is already selling internet-connected appliances
With Samsung’s smart home tech, you’ll be able to set your oven remotely, control all the lights in your house, flip the locks on or off and even watch live camera feed from your security devices, all from your Galaxy smartphone. The products outlined don’t differ massively from anything already on the market, but thanks to Samsung’s current position in the appliances market, the company might well be better poised to compete on distribution and connectivity.
Getting internet-connected devices to talk to one another is Samsung’s strength
Unless companies are able to have their smart devices connect with one another easily, smart homes won’t make life much simpler at all and smart home products will remain a tough sell. Earlier this year, Samsung made a push for the smart home market by acquiring SmartThings, a company that makes a controller that enables different smart devices to talk to each other. If Samsung is able to take SmartThings technology and integrate it into Samsung appliances on a massive scale, they could create a very impressive user experience.
Whilst Apple and Google are relying on other companies to make products that will ‘speak the same networking language,’ Samsung can manufacture products itself and implement a single standard. In July, Google and Samsung, along with a loose consortium of other companies, agreed to use the Thread network protocol. Given the rocky relationship that Google and Samsung have run into previously over Samsung’s use of the Android operating system, it will be interesting to see whether the two companies can make the marriage work this time around. Analysts agree that the two companies need each other enough to encourage them to play nicely, for the time being at least.
Samsung has announced a new $15 billion factory in South Korea
Sliding profits haven’t been able to dent Samsung’s ambitious spending, and the company have also announced that a new $15 billion factory in South Korea will help to create chips for the smart home division. Perhaps this will be the place where Samsung’s vision of the connected home affecting every moment of our daily lives can be set into motion. Will these developments from Samsung be enough to secure them a share of a smart home market set to reach the $100 billion mark by 2018? Only time will tell.
At KAV London, we keep our eyes on the developments of all the major players in the high end space, so that we can continue to install the very best smart homes in the London area and beyond. For more information, you can contact a member of our multilingual sales team on 020 7736 1483.