“We are becoming like you. We are becoming like Americans, too
short-term and cold and logical,” he said, a sadness in his voice.
Amid the saga of Jay Lee, Samsung was still trying to solve the riddle of
the phones that burst into flames. Some 200,000 Galaxy Note 7s and
30,000 batteries had been deposited in a laboratory for testing, where some
seven hundred engineers attempted to uncover the cause of the smoking
phones once and for all.
The hundreds of thousands of disabled Galaxy Note 7s were lined up on
racks, a magnificent mosaic of the empire’s flawed creation, where robotic
arms entered the aisles and retrieved the devices as requested. Grinding
through all-night shifts and grueling meetings, the engineers tested, re-
tested, and discarded each hypothesis in this lab, attempting to re-create the
cause of the fires.
The flames were not the result of the software, the engineers concluded.
Nor did the circuitry cause the fires. The in-house manufacturing process
did not reveal anything unusual. Quality assurance was absolved of
culpability.
Four months after their investigation began, they found their answer.
On the morning of January 23, roughly three weeks before Jay’s arrest,
CEO D.J. Koh took the stage at the Samsung Electronics building in Seoul,
giving an hour-long presentation to the press and the public on the
company’s findings.
“We are taking responsibility for our failure to ultimately identify and
verify the issues arising out of the battery design and manufacturing
process prior to the launch of the Note 7,” D.J. said in a presentation.
He offered a detailed presentation of the technical problems that led to
the fires. Samsung, to the amazement of some in the audience, stuck with a
similar line from before the botched recall: that the battery hardware was
the problem. D.J. didn’t talk about the breakdowns that led to the
company’s failure to identify the problems.
Samsung SDI’s (called “Supplier A” in the presentation) batteries were
the victims of a design flaw that caused the battery to short-circuit.
Pointing to CT scans and diagrams on his presentation slides, D.J. said that
the supplier had created a pouch—the term for the battery’s outside casing
—that didn’t have enough space to allow the battery to expand and contract
when going through normal charge and discharge cycles.
The result was that the positive and negative electrodes touched, short-