Samsung closer to fully connected smart home vision

Samsung Electronics Co. is pushing forward with its goal of offering connected and customized services for 1.4 billion smartphones, TVs and home appliances worldwide, which the South Korean tech giant hopes will differentiate it from its global peers such as Amazon, Apple and Google.

At its investors forum recently held in Hong Kong, the world’s largest smartphone maker said its vision of connecting all home gadgets will materialize in the coming years, according to industry officials on Tuesday. It did not give a timeframe.

At CES 2023, Samsung unveiled an Internet of Things platform, SmartThings Station, that connects multiple devices to create a smarter home, not only for its customers, but also for those of its partner brands.

The CX-MDE center is in charge of the smart home app. The center was established in 2021 to break down barriers between business divisions.

CX stands for customer experience, while MDE is short for multi-device experience.

SmartThings is a dedicated app for home appliance management that controls a total of 1.4 billion electronics gadgets, including 1.28 billion mobile devices; 136 million TVs and monitors; and 10.7 million home appliances.

The app will enable users to choose between dozens of personalized management modes such as sleep mode and family care mode.

For example, when the user sets the sleep mode through the SmartThings app, the lights turn off, the air conditioner maintains the appropriate temperature and the smartphone is automatically set to sleep mode.

With this hyper-connectivity strategy, Samsung plans to gain an edge over its competitors such as Apple, Amazon and Google.

“It is a service that Apple, Amazon and Google cannot emulate,” Huh Taeyoung, head of Samsung Electronics CX-MDE Center, was quoted as saying at the IR event in Hong Kong.

“It is only Samsung Electronics with multiple product lines that can provide it.”

DISPLAY PANELS

Meanwhile, Samsung Display, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, will focus on organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays tailored for vehicles and extended reality devices.

It aims to generate $50 billion in sales from the OLED business each year.

“Our market share for small and medium-sized OLEDs used mainly in smartphones, has reached 70% and we have secured a large number of key patents,” Kim Gong Min, corporate vice president of Samsung Display, told the investors forum.

“We will become the greatest-of-all-time player in the display industry.”

Write to Ik-Hwan Kim at lovepen@hankyung.com
 

Yeonhee Kim edited this article.