Samsung is betting on healthcare from biotech drugs, medical instruments to a healthcare platform under the new leadership. The Korean media outlets have reported Samsung's leadership change and aggression in the health sector.
Samsung has been the ultimate fast follower. This strategy has worked out beautifully for Samsung. Samsung doesn't have much experience in healthcare and an integrated platform approach to meet the end users' needs.
After all, Apple’s branding power is superb. It was a latecomer in mobile phones. And yet, Samsung ended up following Apple’s lead. Apple is really good at reflecting what customers need in product design. Samsung can learn a lot from Apple. Whereas Samsung has the technology, materials and production processes, Apple has set the long-term strategic direction and built the platform encompassing iPhone, iPad, and iCloud, in an integrated fashion accordingly. So far, Apple’s approach makes more sense to me.
Why a sudden interest in healthcare by major electronics firms? Because they know the electronics industry has reached saturation? They simply see a new business opportunity in healthcare? Most of all, they seem to know the fragile nature of the global economy.
Lee Jae-yong seems to understand what it takes to compete in the new businesses. The talents and culture Samsung needs seems to be quite different from those in the hardware business in which Samsung has been. Hence, Lee Jae-yong is trying to change a rigid corporate culture, for example.
Further, Samsung may have to keep in mind that there are ample business opportunities given the global economic conditions and competitive environments. For instance, the open-source approach has a lot to offer.
From Forbes:
Samsung is well entrenched in health.
amsung will be a worthy competitor with its health-oriented devices and services. But the endgame in health is integration. Who will control the relationship between patient and health care provider, who will control the data?
Meanwhile Samsung has chosen a variety of routes into health.
Just prior to Apple’s announcement Samsung announced SAMI – “the Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions, a cloud-based open software platform capable of bringing together diverse data from a variety of sources for analysis.”
While SAMI might be a strategy for how to take data from a variety of wearable devices and integrate them in a dashboard, Samsung’s real ambition is “to become a global leader as a healthcare company through joining together its display, semiconductor, and mobile businesses”.
Through Samsung Medison and its core electronics business, Samsung has a growing business in medical imaging and diagnostics (for example in Ultrasound technology and X-Ray), medical Cloud, and in mobile patient records access within hospitals.
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