Intercultural Management - a Samsung Case

Analyze a culture – specific case study in which a smartphone brand in the US, Europe, or Asia has been successfully built.

CONTENT

Introduction

The South Korea is located in Eastern Asia, southern half of the Korea. Its population is about over 49 million people. Its GDP was 1.781 trillion in 2014, ranked 14 in the world with the annual growth rate 3.3% (CIA 2015).

Samsung Electronics is a multinational conglomerate company of the South Korea. It produces various electronic products such as televisions, tablet PCs, smartphone … and it has been recognized as world’s biggest information technology company by revenue since 2009 (Song & Oliver, 2010). Samsung is a multinational company and has more than 320,000 employees in over 84 countries (Samsung Annual Report 2014). Samsung’s organizational culture is strongly impacted by the South Korean culture which in this assignment will be examined under the perspectives of Hofstede, Trompenaars and Cho & Yoon theories.

Samsung's revenue was equal to 17% of South Korea's $1,082 billion GDP (Danie 2013) and it dominated in South Korea not only in national economy but also in people’s life.

2014 witnessed a significant change of Samsung in terms of product market share, revenue and profit which are presented in the figure 1 below. Since being affected by China and Russia economy and politics, as well as focusing more on investing in Research and Development (R&D), strengthening the brand value and corporate rankings, Samsung still remains its huge amount of revenues and profits.

Chosen to compare in the bar chart in figure 2 below, Samsung and its biggest rivals Apple, LG and Sony continue to dominate the smartphone market in 2014. However, it can be seen that Samsung is the leader in terms of market share with 20.9% over 10.2% of the closest rival Apple.

The success of this giant technology company has been brought together a number of different factors. They can be listed as innovation, research and development, marketing, human resource and planning system, and organizational culture. This paper is produced to analyze and investigate appropriate evidence for Samsung’s success, mainly focus on its organizational culture under three theoretical frameworks of Geert Hofstede (and Bob Waisfisz), Fons Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner and Yung-Ho Cho and Jeong Hoo Yoon. Therefore, this paper will answer the following questions: “How does Samsung’s organizational culture contribute to its success?”

Organizational Frameworks Theories

According to the Figure 3, South Korea has three outstanding cultural dimensions which present its national nature. In this case only, we examine the Long-term Orientation cultural dimension. This particular dimension expresses how each society gains