Review | Samsung story: mistakes, bribery and corruption behind the South Korean tech giant laid bare in new book
- Samsung Rising by journalist Geoffrey Cain gives the inside story of the global tech giant, damning its failures as much as admiring its achievements
- Particular attention is given to its chairman Lee Kun-hee, described here warts and all
Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech, by Geoffrey Cain, Currency, 3 stars
Although Samsung stands out today as a giant of the international consumer electronics market, not long ago the idea that a Korean company could achieve global reach and dominance would have seemed unlikely, except perhaps among regional experts.
Geoffrey Cain’s new book isn’t the first about Samsung, South Korea’s largest chaebol, or family-owned business conglomerate in South Korea. Song Jae-yong’s The Samsung Way is six years old, Kim Chun-hyo’s Samsung Media Empire and Family: A Power Web is five years old, while Chang Sea-jin’s Sony vs Samsung and my own book, Samsung Electronics and the Struggle for Leadership of the Electronics Industry, are now a decade old.
But in such a fast-moving industry, it’s time for a new corporate biography. Cain’s Samsung Rising is, like the others, unauthorised, and it is the outsider’s perspective that shapes the view. Cain, a journalist, focuses as much on mistakes as achievements.
Cain opens his account of Samsung’s rise with a long chapter on one of the largest of these mistakes: the exploding Galaxy Note 7 smartphones of 2015. This moment at the end of the reign of chairman Lee Kun-hee shows the company in a relatively poor light compared with when the chairman conducted a celebrated destruction of mobile phones to demand better quality at the beginning of the 1990s.