This is the group project of GE2263 – Information Management. I did the project in my year 2 2021/22 Semester B.

Presentation Slides:

Course Instructor: Prof. ZUO Zhiya

Executive Summary

Project Background:

Although Samsung has reached the 8th highest global brand value in 2020¹, the competitive strength in this electronics industry is extremely strong. If Samsung wants to sustain customers’ loyalty and brand image as well as increase its market share, there will be some changes and improvement needed. Due to various products that Samsung provided, this report will mainly focus on the part of the Mobile device.

Project Objective:

The main objective of this project is to propose some insight into IS solutions to help Samsung enhance its business process. The IS solutions are based on the perspective of what Samsung has and what it lacks.

Analysis Method:

The data is crawled from the Facebook page of Samsung, and the purpose is to collect the customer opinion and analysis their sentiment based on all the comments. Understanding the customer suggestion is imperative for Samsung as it provides a lot of insight for improvement.

Target Audience:

The target audience of this project will focus on the decision-makers of Samsung as only they have the right to change the policy of the company.

1. Introduction

The mobile device industry is one of the giants in the technology aspect. This industry included the production of smartphones, tablets and some smart accessories that allow users to carry on their bodies. According to Chris (2022), the annual global revenue of the mobile device industry is approximately $409.1 billion in 2021. This industry generates large monetary advantages for leading firms and effectively gives impetus to the development of electronic technologies.

This report proposes to analyze the Samsung mobile device industry, one of the largest firms in this industry, with their product and business process. Porter’s 5 Forces model and competitive advantage will be discussed. For in-depth investigation, textual comments on the Samsung social media page are used to conduct an analysis of the challenges and opportunities for Samsung future development in this industry. Several information systems and information management are suggested to prepare for the opportunities and solve the problems they may encounter in the future in order to build a sustainable business model.

2. Business Analysis

2.1 Products and business processes

Samsung provides various products in industrial electronics, such as semiconductors, memory chips, mobile phones, LCD/LED panels, integrated systems, etc. This report will focus on the part of the Mobile device mainly.

The business processes of Samsung can be divided into two parts, research and development (R&D) and manufacturing. The first part (R&D) indicates Samsung’s focus on identifying the growth and improvement of their product by renewing the technologies. Samsung put lots of resources into their 14 overseas R&D centers and 7 global AI centers. For instance, LED Display Technology and 5G Technology are some of their research results.

Despite the R&D part, Samsung has mobile phone manufacturing facilities in different countries. They modernized all the factories by creating many warehouses for better inventory management. Apart from that, the manufacturing business process of Samsung has also shifted a lot to the ODM model. It allows Samsung not to utilize all the resources from their factories which somehow reduces the cost. The Galaxy A6s Smartphone is one example. The ODM method will also enable customers to enjoy their phone products at a more affordable price. It is expected that users will be able to see more and more ODM smartphones from Samsung in the near future.

2.2 Porter’s 5 Forces model

The existing rivals of Samsung required production in the Android mobile devices industry. According to Counterpoint market monitor services (2022), Google and XiaoMi are one of the most potential existing rivals in the industry. The substitution companies are those selling mobile devices with different operating systems. As Apple products have a completely different nature of mobile devices, Apple is defined as one of the substitution companies for Samsung in mobile devices aspects. These substitution companies hold a sizeable portion of the market share, so they are considered as strong forces. The competitive forces of new competitors are relatively weak in the hi-tech industry since it requires professional skills, knowledge, and capital investment which small firms can hardly participate in.

The bargaining power of suppliers to Samsung can be both weak and vital force. Samsung owns the high-end technology to produce its chips while the supplies of raw materials by other companies for manufacturing chips have been steady in recent years, it is therefore considered a weak force. In terms of assembling, it is a strong force as there are many gathering factories all over the world. Besides, the bargaining power of consumers is a weak force. As Samsung benefits from the fan economy, Samsung’s customers have a significant level of loyalty, which avoids the loss of consumers and increases their sales.

2.3 Competitive advantages

Samsung has several competitive strategies on products. Firstly, Samsung always has the innovation to develop products. Samsung observe the potential of phone industry in late 1960s. They continue innovating new product and technology for long year. Until now, Samsung still have majority of the smartphone market. Secondly, Samsung continues to improve its techniques. Samsung developed full-screen phone for better user experience. Also, they pioneered the world’s first dual pixel sensor on camera which makes us taking photos clearly in dark environment. Thirdly, Samsung focus at new product development. In 2019, Samsung developed the foldable smartphone, Galaxy Fold. It passed the test of 200000 folds and became the first foldable phone in the world.

Samsung has competitive advantage in the process. Samsung lock in customers by aiming to be a higher-quality brand with appropriate price. Samsung invested much in technical innovation. Smartphone users who seek for high performance and cost-effectiveness will certainly choose Samsung. Besides, “Galaxy for the planet: for a sustainable future” make an contribution for the environment. By recycling and reducing the waste in the production, Samsung dedicate to promote a sustainable future for humans. Samsung also continue the idea in Galaxy Unpacked 2022.

3. Social Media Comments, Problems & Opportunities

3.1 Data Collection

We collect data sources from Facebook page “Samsung Global”. We put the focus on comments from 01/01/2018 to 31/12/2019 and from 01/01/2020 to 31/12/2021 to indicate the difference within 2 years. In 2018-2019’s analysis, there are totally 34 posts. In 2020-2021’s analysis, there are totally 38 posts.

3.2 Text Topic Analysis

Prospective customers

According to 2018-2019’s analysis of Text topics of Samsung’s Facebook, there are total 814 number of documents about potential customers looking forward to phone new update of next year. Also, they requested for changes on screen, and new version upgrade.

According to 2020-2021’s text topics analysis, there are 740 numbers of documents towards the upgrade of Samsung smartphone. Among the number, we found that prospective customers mostly put the expectations on Galaxy Note and Fold, two series of phone.

Customers

In 2018-2019, lots of users expressed their fond of Samsung’s phone products. They praised on mainly Galaxy series, Tab series. Besides, 874 comments wrote Samsung as “the best brand”, “nice”, “love”. It means Samsung customers has certain brand loyalty to buy and support the products.

From 2020-2021, users had positive comment on Samsung new upgrade. 193 comments acclaimed new upgrade as “amazed”, “the best”, “awesome”. Moreover, 452 comments recognised the significance of Samsung in the future.

3.3 Problems and Opportunities

Compare to previous years, Samsung’s products do not satisfy customer expectations. The Facebook community reaction shows that there is fewer positive words or phrases customers are willing to give while Samsung had posted more product announcement. The community may lose brand loyalty and the freshness of awaiting Samsung’s brand-new products to the market. It reflected that the market strategy of the company may not in line with market expectations. Djatmiko and Pradana (2016) pointed out that the overall brand image has a correlative relationship to the product price in the market. In order to remain the market capacity, Samsung may understand the market expectation by listening on social media platforms or communities.

Even though comments on Samsung are reflecting the loss of brand image in the recent years, it still owns the largest market share among android phone. According to Counterpoint, Samsung owns around 20% market share in the global smartphone market while it owns the largest proportion among the Android phone market. It is believed that Samsung have its fan economy and their customers are contribute to have high loyalty toward Samsung. In 2020, Samsung launched a new phone called Galaxy S20 FE just base on fans’ opinion which certainly shows how they care about their fanbase. With the data extracted above, users’ comments suggested that they are await for in the foreseeable future in Samsung while 2 series of product are with high expectation, which are the Galaxy Note and Galaxy Fold. To improve brand image, Samsung should focus on the development of these 2 series of products and make some breakthroughs on its technology.

4. Proposed IM/IS Solutions

4.1 Intranet and Accuracy of Data

Through the charts given in Part 2, it is shown that the customers’ loyalty and brand image have been dropping significantly. Therefore, an intranet is suggested. Because Samsung company allows customers to give feedback under their social media, various comments such as likes and dislikes, texts, and images from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are the first-hand data of customers’ views on Samsung phones. Including the help of a record management system (RMS) and artificial intelligence system, these data can be used to classify, identify, and store the records. The record can then be grouped into different satisfaction levels and make comparison with records from other seasons. These reports would be in a higher visibility and can be auto-generated in different seasons.

Also, the drop in loyalty can be checked by the activity done by customers. The flow of social media data can be easily seen by reports and charts generated from the database. Trends can then be calculated to see if the loyalty of customers has decreased or increased. In terms of keeping the customers’ loyalty, Samsung should set up a department for acquiring customers’ expectations for their following products. When customers’ wills are fulfilled, they will continue to buy Samsung’s products.

In addition, we suggest that Samsung can regularly hold questionnaires as an information-gathering technique to collect specific and accurate data. There may also be a risk that bots or fake users generate the likes and dislikes in social media. A regular hold of questionnaires can study real-time attitudes and comments of devoted customers. In this way, more solid and comprehensive statements can be given, and more specific changes and improvements can be made by Samsung.

4.2 Enterprise Resource Planning

Better management of enterprise information systems and intranet platforms should be applied to increase the product development of Samsung. Despite the fact that Samsung shares the largest proportion among the Android smartphone market, we concur that it could achieve an even more extensive penetration due to its advanced technology. To further increase market penetration, enhancing information management is suggested for speeding up the product planning manufacturing procedure.

Enterprise information systems asse. enterprise resource planning (ERP), and supply chain management (SCM) systems. To achieve fastening each product’s design and manufacture process, better management of enterprise information systems effectively finds out the redundant processes and eliminates them. As the product development cycles speed up, it is believed that product competitiveness will be increased.

The intranet platform can help to facilitate communication and collaboration among different employees and departments. In traditional communication, employees collaborate with formal email, which leads to a long duration of waiting and replying and results in a non-effective working procedure. Indeed, due to the pandemic situation, work-from-home even worsens the delay in communication. To deal with it, an intranet platform allows easy and instant information spreading, sharing files, and collaborating on projects with only a VPN connection applied. Research also shows that applying the intranet platform can realize a 2-4% revenue rise.

4.3 Improving AI software assistant

Artificial Intelligence is always a big part of Management Information Systems. Although Samsung has implemented this system into their mobile device ecosystem already, it is not that well-known or well-used compared with the other phone brands, such as Apple’s or Huawei one. In order to enhance the user-experience by AI, it should be fully embedded into their phone. Although Samsung has already ranked the largest smartphone company in the first quarter of 2019, the many big competitors, such as Huawei, is chasing tightly through these years as many of them are trying to build and improve their AI software assistant, like Samsung made their Bixby and Huawei made Celia. It is believed that building their own AI assistant can help the user to finish many tasks with a simple voice command, as well as smoothing the entire user experience.

But the fact is, Samsung still has a long way to go on this path. If Samsung really wants their customers to feel better when using their phone in order to consolidate their market share, they should really go deeper into improving this AI assistant, the features and smartness of Bixby are simply not enough. You can easily find a lot of customers of Samsung from the Internet talking about why and what they do not like of Bixby. There was even an anti-Bixby sentiment raised on Reddit to discuss something like how to disable it or Samsung should stop implementing it etc². It somehow indicates the user is extremely not satisfied with the performance of Bixby. Samsung should really consider putting more effort and resources into improving Bixby. While it’s still a huge step forward to see many Android phone companies try to build new solutions to improve their products, such as creating their own AI voice assistants, they still have a long way to go³. Apple has the largest Mobile Vendor Market Share currently. Their AI assistant is trained to be smart enough to help users finish many daily tasks. Apple has put a lot of effort into improving Siri by implementing AI technology. For instance, ‘Hey Siri’ command was trained by machine learning algorithm, the Deep Neural Network and two pass detection⁴. Other companies such as Samsung can further study and learn from the case of Apple, like how did Siri works great at some detail-oriented tasks, so that they can give the user a better experience with AI technology.

5. Conclusion

In this paper, we have studied Samsung’s mobile industry and identified what problems and opportunities Samsung is facing. It is no doubt that Samsung nowadays is the leading enterprise in the android phone market, but in the meantime, Samsung is losing advantages due to the highly competitive forces of existing rivals (XiaoMi or Google) and substile (Apple). With the text topic analysis, it is also found that Samsung lost its fan base as it cannot fulfill the expectation of customers. We can see that the development of Samsung is reducing.

However, some advantages including brand image can be made use of for Samsung. Since Samsung is a long-established enterprise, the reputation of Samsung is guaranteed while it can make use of its own prestige to promote its phone. It is therefore promoted three IM solutions for Samsung which are to increase customers’ loyalty, increase market share by applying management information systems and enhance its AI system.

With the above analysis and suggestions, we believe that Samsung will be able to tackle the problem of losing fan base and gain sustainable development as well as enhance business process in the future.

6. References

Advantages of Intranet: How Intranets Drive Business Growth. Jive Software. (2020, November 6). Retrieved March 26, 2022, from https://www.jivesoftware.com/blog/advantages-of-intranet/

Djatmiko, T., & Pradana, R. (2016). Brand Image and Product Price; Its Impact for Samsung Smartphone Purchasing Decision. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 219, 221–227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.05.009

Everphone, & RainZeros. (2022, February 24). Global smartphone market share: By quarter.

Counterpoint Research. Retrieved March 11, 2022, from https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share/

Manufacturing Mobility & Smart Factory Solutions | Samsung Business. Samsung Electronics. Retrieved March 30, 2022, from https://www.samsung.com/us/business/solutions/industries/manufacturing/

Mobile vendor market share worldwide. StatCounter Global Stats. Retrieved March 27, 2022, from https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile

S., A. (2020, March 23). This petition requests Samsung to stop using Exynos processors in its phones. SamMobile. Retrieved March 27, 2022, from https://www.sammobile.com/news/samsung-stop-using-exynos-processors-phones-petition/

SamMobile. (2019, November 26). Where are Samsung phones made? It’s not where you think. https://www.sammobile.com/where-are-samsung-phones-made

Appendix

Figure 1. Screen Capture of SAS Miner (2018-2019)

Figure 2. Screen Capture of SAS Miner (2020-2021)

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2. Silver, S. (2020, April 28). Why do so many Samsung fans hate Bixby? The National Interest. Retrieved April 16, 2022, from https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/why-do-so-many-samsung-fans-hate-bixby-148911 ↩︎
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