News

Samsung Mobile chief gets pay cut by nearly 50% following poor performance

50

Samsung Galaxy S4 JK Shin

While Samsung still sits firmly atop the smartphone world, the company hasn’t been able to maintain the same pace of growth they enjoyed throughout the past few years. After recent financial results showed a 60% drop in net profit year-over-year, Samsung Mobile head JK Shin has taken a pretty steep pay cut. He was paid $630,000 for last quarter’s performance, nearly half of the $1.5 million he earned in Q2.

Despite the poor performance, Samsung as a whole continues to rake in the dough. They reported revenue of $43 billion in the third quarter for a still-not-bad profit boost of $4.3 billion. So why the sharp decline? It’s tough to say without a clear look inside Samsung’s operations, though it’s possible the company’s desire to push innovation in areas of TV and mobile could be driving the costs of research and development way up.

Another possibility is that Samsung simply can’t stop some of these up-and-coming smaller guys from eating into their market share. Worldwide smartphone share is shifting day by day, with manufacturers from the Asian sector seeing perhaps the biggest uptick in market share and sales. Affordable, yet capable, smartphones from Chinese and Taiwan OEMs are capturing the interests and dollars of many, and stiffened mobile competition overall (from the big guys like HTC, Sony, LG and Motorola) means Samsung doesn’t have it quite as easy as they once did.

There’s no easy answer for rebounding, but this price cut for JK Shin should be a big enough kick in the pants to find whatever strategy they can to make sure they reverse course and get back on track to the sort of growth Samsung’s shareholders are used to. We’ll see if the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and Note Edge will do anything to help Samsung out as we look ahead to 2015.

[via Wall Street Journal]

Quentyn Kennemer
The "Google Phone" sounded too awesome to pass up, so I bought a G1. The rest is history. And yes, I know my name isn't Wilson.

5 days left to enter to win a Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 from AndroidArea!

Previous article

Mobile Roar 70: Android Lollipop updates, YouTube Music, and more!

Next article

You may also like

50 Comments

  1. I’m sure he’ll be starving.

  2. Poor performance indeed! A coworker of mine had a GS3. After 7 months almost everything force-closed when he tried to open it and two years after he bought it it blew up.

    1. That’s weird….I have a GS3 and it’s running in top condition….I keep downloaded apps at minimum…use automatic upload for pictures and videos so they don’t stay on phone. Disabled all apps I do not use and motion/sensor features. Disable S-Voice..delete unneeded text messages..All music is on SD Card so it doesn’t have to access the SD card much. Reduced animations, 24kb all black wallpaper and lock screen..no widgets… Only bottom row of apps….I’m happy and it runs smooth

      1. god I hope you are kidding…you just described a Nokia 918 phone basically

        1. Lol..its not that bad..I only turned off what I don’t use…I’m not really big on wallpapers…I don’t like Live Wallpapers.. Every now and then I may use a wallpaper but I like black to save battery life..lol

      2. Strange…

    2. I use a GS3 on a daily basis still.

    3. Works fine for me after 2 years. The only force closes I get are the Phandroid app every day, haha.
      Sounds like your coworker might be foolishly using the awful “power saving mode”, which by default throttles the CPU, causing insufferable lag, freezing, and force closes. Tell him to turn it off, it’ll feel like a brand new phone.

      1. Thats not the issue. If you long press the power saving thing, you can turn CPU throttling off.

  3. They need to do this as well in the US lol

    1. Too true. Actually I’ve seen in some of the best performing USA companies the CEO is getting paid less than some worst performing companies CEOs. What the crap!?!

  4. Chinese squeezing them from the bottom…Apple squeezing them up top…they’re screwed.

    1. While you’re right that they’re being squeeze from both sides, they’re hardly screwed… they’re still the biggest smartphone manufacturer by a long shot.

      1. True…but it is only the beginning…Chinese OEMs are not going away anytime soon…they are growing by leaps and bounds. Apple is not losing anyone these days and only gaining the upper end of buyers.

        They saw this coming too…thus their on-going experiment with Tizen.

      2. and they make more than just phones, i can admit im on the verge of buyinh one of there 4k T.V.s lol, but not their phones

    2. They still made huge profits, they’re simply not growing as much now which was always expected to happen eventually.

      To conclude they are screwed from this information just shows you don’t know what your talking about.

  5. waaaaa cry me a river

  6. How can he live on just $630,000 per quarter?

    1. Can you imagine how much that would suck to have to switch from Beluga Caviar to Osetra Golden? He probably has to cut back on Caviar for his cat too:

      http://www.beverlyhillscaviar.com/gourmetpetfood/luxuryfoodforpets/

      Poor little guy

      1. The horror! The horror!

    2. Epic post and hilarious ! ” Won’t someone please think of the children??? “

  7. Wow! An executive actually getting a pay cut? That doesn’t happen in the U.S., here they get a bonus no matter how the company performs.

    1. That was my thoughts. All companies should do this. Will force people to earn that paycheck which should in turn actually drive better products for consumers.

  8. I know how to fix it get rid of touchwiz and tizen and start running stock android.

    1. The average user doesn’t care about stock Android, besides I like touchwiz and . Stock Android looks boring.

      1. I guess I forgot the average person is stupid.

        1. Well done idiot.

        2. Don’t forget that most Touchwiz fans are like iSheep

        3. U just dissed your mom

          1. So, what if i did. lol I don’t really care for my mother but she’s actually really smart. She skipped a grade in school and has her master’s degree in accounting.

      2. I’m going to give you a few reason why stock android is great because I hate when people only call names. It usually shows that they don’t really know what they are talking about. Having stock android increases your chances of getting updates. It also means you are less likely to run into compatibility issues with apps. Your less likely to have your device become unresponsive, freeze and then crash. You seem like the type of person that still buys their computer off the shelf. One of the many reasons I like to build my own is because I hate bloatware. If you are buying a non stock android phone you are getting a ton of it. If you think stock android looks boring you haven’t actually spent any time with android. You can customize android to look how ever you want. You could make it look like ios or a windows phone or something totally unrecognizable. I’m adding a link to lifehacker to show you what is possible. I think they put out a new theme each week.

        http://lifehacker.com/tag/skins

        1. I’m not going to go into detail, but don’t make assumptions about the people your replying too idiot.

          I’m posting from a high end system built myself and I use a highly customized and of course rooted OnePlus One 64GB, I’ve been flashing roms for over 7 years, even before Android.

          Don’t be so closed minded, understand that there are advantages to non stock android, everybody has different preferences and the average user is simply not interested in updates and what is or is not stock.

          That doesn’t make them idiots, that just means they’re not tech savvy.

          1. LOL You just called them idiots. You idiot. LOL Maybe you should have looked up antonyms for savvy. Don’t worry I did it for you. The opposite of savvy (or the meaning of not savvy) is unclever, unintelligent, and stupid. I’m sure all those idiots love to have to buy a new phone when they want to update their OS.

          2. You looked it up and still got the wrong answer, you fail at the internet. Well done.

          3. No I didn’t maybe you should recheck yourself or do I need to post the link for you?

          4. The average user may not be interested in updates, until the new features in the apps they use aren’t supported for their OS version, or a security issue takes forever to get patched and their device falls victim to it.

            You talk about being closed minded, while assuming that the average user doesn’t care about updates, when you don’t know it for a fact either. So what if stock looks boring, this is Android, not iOS. Many things can be changed, even without root. So why go with something that most of the time only acts to chew through resources? I can’t imagine looking at Touchwiz and thinking, man that looks nice and well thought out. It looks like it was designed by middle school children.

      3. Use stock for a week and you will never go back to CrapWiz ever again.

  9. Get. Rid. Of. Touchwiz. Simple as that.

    1. Not that simple. the phones themselves need a redesign, too much bezel on the S5 and they need to avoid plastic now just to avoid the all the negative crap they keep getting as result.

      Also might be time for the physical buttons to go.

      1. yup. they need to stop trying to make their phones like iphones. Just like u said the physical home button. All other OEM have gone to soft keys. LG’s ui is horrible.

  10. Sammy, you should learn from Moto

    1. Please no, Motorola produce phones with no stand-out features, they’re like the prime example of the generic boring android device.

      Well they did at least move over OLED, I’ll give them credit for that. Samsung’s displays are better though.

      1. No stand out features. Like Moto Display, Voice, or Assist. But things like putting an IR blaster, heart rate monitor, and finger print scanner, that other OEMS and competitors are doing, are standout. OK then.

        Personally a feature is only worthwhile if it’s actually useful. Samsung throws everything but the kitchen sink in and hopes it’ll work. Motorola put some thought into their device and included things that people will use everyday. I had a Samsung phone, and didn’t use 75% of the features, unless to show people what it had on there. I use all of the features on my Motorola phone everyday.

        1. Samsung’s stand out features are displays, cameras, battery life and performance whether its from the latest Snapdragon SoC or their own.

          After that it’s water resistance, dust proof, fingerprint scanner and then all the software features.

          Samsung spend a huge amount R&D.

          1. A stand out feature is something that sets it apart from it’s competition. You’ve just described everything that the competition also has. Some of those features they may do better, others they may not. But the difference is, no one else is doing anything like Moto’s features. Any other OEM doing anything like Moto Display? Anyone else dedicated hardware for voice controls?

            A standout feature should be something that no one else has, not just doing the same things as well as or better than the competition.

  11. I like some of Samsungs devices. I like some of touchwizs features too. Is it a bit bloated? Yes, but I don’t have any issues either. Now I also had both nexus 7s and I just like my 8.4 pro and note 8 better.

  12. I also like not having buttons hogging up my screen real estate

  13. So what would’ve happened if they got every person in the world, and then…GASP, their profits remained the same! When they started they had nowhere to go but up, but at some point growth will slow. Did they think that their growth percentage would stay the same forever? How did these people end up running a business like Samsung?

  14. If the launch of the Note 4 is any indication, and if I had anything to do with it, poor JK Shin is in for another cut. I ordered – directly from Samsung – a Verizon Note 4 Developer Edition and got a Note 3 DE instead! By the time I could call them, they were out of stock again. That’s been 3 weeks ago and they’re STILL out of stock. This is almost as much a taffy-pull as the Verizon Galaxy Nexus launch in September/October/November/December 2011…

  15. A pay cut for not being able to stop the inevitable. Samsung are just an Android OEM and they will eventually full into line with the rest of the OEM’s scraping profits together in the race to the bottom Android OEM industry.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More in News