2011 Round-Up: Samsung's Leading Products

You're a Champion, Samsung.

The year 2011 has been challenging for many global companies, with the lingering fiscal problems in the euro zone economies casting shadows upon the world economic outlook and the pace of technology development and product innovations increasingly picking up speed.

When many companies are grappling to simply survive, maintaining a competitive edge has become much more difficult than ever. It is especially so in the high-tech industries where billions of dollars in investment and continued research and innovations are just basic requirements to be considered as a player. But, Samsung is a different company. Driven by ambitions, driven by innovation.

Today we’d like to share a recent survey by the leading Japanese economic newspaper Nikkei which gives a comprehensive look into the competitive landscape of the global manufacturing and service industries. The news article lists 50 goods and services that powered the world economy in 2011, from Internet search engines to shipbuilding and auto manufacturing, and identifies leaders of each market segment. Not surprisingly, the technology industry made up a large part of it. And Samsung, was the leader.

We also found a number of flagship Samsung products at the top of the rankings, from our smartphones to memory chips to flat-screen TVs. Below we put together some market share graphs based on various research firm data cited by the Nikkei.

Samsung has the No. 1 position in seven different technology products: Samsung Electronics’ smartphone, flat-screen TV, DRAM (dynamic random access memory), NAND flash memory and SSD (Solid State Disk), Samsung SDI’s PDP (plasma display panel) and Samsung Display’s OLED. Leader Sammy!

And the list remains dynamic, as Samsung not only has successfully kept its decades-long leadership in DRAM (since 1992) but continuously made forays into new area, also securing the lead in NAND flash memory (since 2002), flat-screen TVs (since 2006) and finally smartphones (in 2011). Regarding the latest, the Nikkei wrote: “With the success of Galaxy S series, Samsung Electronics strengthened its industrial leadership, showing rapid growth in the highly competitive smartphone market.”

Overall, the U.S. remains at the top of the list when it comes to the number of leading products and services it dominates; U.S. companies rank highest in 19 product and service categories in 2011, including personal computers and tablet PC. Japan comes next with nine No.1 products including automobiles, robots and digital cameras, closely followed by South Korea which claimed the world leader position in eight items.

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