Newsletter
There’s no doubt that Samsung is one of the biggest tech companies in the world. It doesn’t matter what products they put out on the street, what quality those products are or if they’re just an experiment. The fact is that Samsung is everywhere, from smartphones to laptops, from air conditioning to washing machines, from 5 inch displays to massive 84 inch 4K TVs.
More than once Samsung has been accused of taking a shotgun approach to their products, just throw everything out there and see what sticks. That might be true sometimes but in order to accomplish this and still be one of the most successful and profitable companies in the world, the infrastructure needed has to be massive. The question here is how massive does it have to be to be able to pull this.
That number is 270,000 people big. Yep, over a quarter million people work for Samsung across 79 countries. Samsung’s growth has been impressive, last July the head count was at 236,000 and now, less than three months later, they added 34,000 people, that’s almost 400 new employees a day.
As a comparison, Microsoft has somewhere around 100,000 employees and Amazon is short behind with 97,000 people. Apple is almost there with 90,000 and Google is about half way there with 46,000 including Motorola’s staff. Facebook is way behind with just 5,000 employees.
When you see the numbers side by side, Samsung’s headcount is even more impressive. They have more people working for them than Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook combined. Obviously, none of those companies has the reach Samsung has, they make processors, RAM memories, Displays, Smartphones, Tablets, Cameras, Washing Machines, Air Conditioners, Laptops, Fridges, Microwaves, Ovens, Printers, Hard Drives and so many more I could go on all day. And that’s consumers products alone. Think about how many people are needed in the R&D department to develop all those products. And I’m not even talking about marketing and sales department across the globe.
Anyway, the 270,000 headcount is justified and Samsung is one of the biggest companies in the world in sales as well with $187.7 billion in annual sales.
Obviously, those people have to work somewhere and that’s why Samsung has huge buildings all over the world, like the massive San Jose campus which is about to be expanded with 1.1 million square feet more, or the new Research and Development facility in Mountain View, California which will consist of two six-story buildings across 8.5 acres.
We know there’s a lot of smart people there and the results speak for themselves with the millions and millions of devices they sell each quarter, but I wish Samsung would pay a little more attention to details like fit and finish for their smartphones and tablets or better overall interface design which looks really old by now. The fact that their latest flagship the Galaxy S4 doesn’t even run smoothly out of the box doesn’t look good either. With that many people, I’m sure they could do better products and still keep their profits high.