Katie Marsal
Following Samsung's legal defeat against Apple last week, the company held an emergency meeting on Sunday led by vice chairman Coi Gee-sung and head of Samsung's mobile business JK Shin, according to Reuters. Not participating in the meeting was Samsung Chief Executive Kwon Oh-hyun, whose responsibility mostly lies with the company's components business.
The reason that Kwon was reportedly not present, even though he is the CEO of Samsung, is because the company has a "strict internal firewall" between its component supply business and handset operations, Monday's report indicated.
Citing an unnamed executive who took part in Sunday's meeting in Seoul, it was said that Samsung considers its supply contract with Apple a "separate issue from the litigation," in which Samsung was found to have copied features of Apple's iPhone and iPad.
Kwon oversees Samsung, but JK Shin aoversees the telecommunications business and BK Yoon is in charge of Samsung's electronics side. The divisions have been made to "avoid potential conflicts of interest" with major customers like Apple.
While Apple and Samsung are fierce competitors in the businesses of smartphones, tablets, computers and more, Samsung is also Apple's largest supplier of components and parts for its popular devices. Most notably, Samsung is responsible for building the custom processors featured in Apple's iOS devices, including the iPhone and iPad.
There have been persistent rumors that Apple would like to move production of its custom ARM CPUs away from Samsung to another chipmaker, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. However, thus far there has been no indication that anyone other than Samsung has received orders for the A5 chip found in the iPhone 4S or the A5X processor that powers the third-generation iPad with Retina display.
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81 Comments
Oh my, so they still contend that they didn't copy anything, but for some reason need a firewall?
Samsung simply cannot afford to lose its major client, Apple. It needs Apple.
The firewall is a fig leaf. The Samsung component division prepared a document on the iPhone that was used by the division making the Samsung phones. Got to be other fabs that can make the A4/5 chips. Intel? IBM? TXN? It makes sense to fab with a U company to keep trade secrets. The rest of the stuff is mostly generic, except for QCOM telecom chips and they are not going to mess with Apple.
As long as it doesn't look like Apple's firewall, I don't see a problem.
Oh my, so they still contend that they didn't copy anything, but for some reason need a firewall?
This is to be fully expected. The term 'firewall' is just a not-so-appropriate, or somewhat unfortunate, word in this case. The 'division/s' responsible for component manufacture most certainly would not want to be tainted by the action of other divisions, in this case, the handset business. There are probably separate divisions too for such products as white goods, computer and televisions. None of these would be too happy with the mobile products division right now for sure!