Guardians of the Galaxy
AT 9:40 A.M. ON February 10, 2010, twenty-eight executives gathered in the
Gold Conference Room on the tenth floor of the Samsung building in
Gangnam. J.K. Shin, the relatively new head of the mobile communications
business, took the floor. “[Our] quality isn’t good,” a company memo would
quote him as saying, adding that the designers were under pressure in terms
of the schedule of their products because the company put out so many
different models.
J.K. Shin, a lifetime Samsung employee, was an engineer who had risen
through the research and development department and been promoted to
head of mobile communications two years after K.T. Lee departed. It was
Shin who was now leading the charge to overtake Apple.
“He was a very aggressive leader,” a former vice president told me.
“You had to get up and say that you were going to accomplish something
almost impossible. Otherwise you’d get thrown off the stage.” If you
pledged to reach a goal in a year, he’d respond, in dead seriousness, “That’s
great, but can we do it next quarter?”
Kim Titus, a former Samsung spokesman, said of him, “He was
semifamous for his kind of showmanship. He would pretend he was a
magician. He would pull out a phone from his suit pocket. And he would
pull out another one from his pants pocket. And he’d lay them all out, and
try to get the customers [the carriers] excited.”
Samsung and others were pursuing carrier-centric marketing, putting
more of their efforts into winning over carriers rather than consumers.
Samsung found itself ranked near the bottom of the mobile category in
sales. Apple was on top. Samsung’s executives weren’t sure yet whether so-
called smartphones—still a nebulous and ill-defined concept—should be