Samsung SDI is going to struggle in a World with cheap coal prices and political inclinations (cf. Trump campaign) to not care about environmental impacts.
Samsung Heavy Industries is already struggling because of market demands for new container ships dropping off sharply in recent years - there has been a glut of supply for some years.
Their Engineering and Construction groups have moderate turnover on focused/strategic projects that go to lowest-cost bidders, they can't keep the entire company going.
They have a reasonable sized Financial Services group of companies, but they're not exactly global players, and it's going to be hard to see them picking up enough growth to keep things going if their consumer electronics division flounders.
They have a group dedicated to health and medical equipment, that might do well, but the largest market for healthcare in the World (the US), is currently playing political football with that industry, so, you know, tricky.
Their washing machines are exploding, and demand for products like air conditioning remains high but might be curbed by issues in the power sector within developing nations as people try to figure out what that infrastructure looks like on the 10-year, 25-year and 50-year terms, which again, they are fighting in another group.
They have a ton of electronics businesses that will continue to do well, but ironically because Apple is one of their biggest customers for their products.
It's not obvious to me that they are more robust than Nokia was. They have a lot of risks across a lot of their groups, with their phone division being perhaps the lowest risk group of the lot.
Good luck to them, but the Samsung fanbois (and yes, there are many of them), need to realise this is going to be a tough time for the company. For the sake of the smaller stockholders and the employees, I hope they get through this.
So they have a massively diversified business that faces many risks, just as others in those sectors do, but which is generally doing pretty well.
One phone will not kill this.
Having just bought a new Samsung washing machine, the story that they are exploding seems to have passed me by.
I'm not a fanboi - I'm typing this on a Nexus 6 and considering another motorola next - I just think that saying this might be fatal is somewhat silly.
I think "exploding" was an unfortunate choice of words, and that was supposed to mean they are selling a lot(they seem to be popular in Brazil and are considererd high end).
Samsung is too much of South Korea's GDP to go bankrupt. For Samsung to fail, the Korean economy would have to also fail, which is possible but unlikely.
I think that if you compare Samsung's Note 7 to Nokia's Burning Platform, the prospects for Samsung are significantly better (Nokia not only destroyed the value of 100% of their inventory but also all of their future inventory until the OS changeover happened; Samsung has a branding problem but can release another device).
Honestly, they should just rename it to something else (at the very least not the Note, but maybe even call it something other than Samsung in the US).
Edit: I do agree with your supposition that mobile is the primary revenue driver for Samsung, but I don't actually think they're generating a profit from mobile any more. I continue to contend that the only company that makes a profit on mobile is Apple and they continue to dominate that market for reasons that are fairly obvious (supply chain, silicon superiority, and software that works faster for the workloads consumers run on their devices).
Samsung hovers around what 20% of South Korean GDP?
Nokia was around 4-5% of Finland and some say its loss was the best thing to happen of the country's tech sector. I haven't seen any real analysis however.
Isn't that backwards? (ie. if Samsung failed, South Korea's economy would take a massive hit?)
I think this will hurt Samsung significantly but not fatally. They'll come back with a nice fancy new phone (although they may not re-use the Note moniker) and they'll price it at barely above break-even to encourage people to give them another chance, and people will love them again.
> Isn't that backwards? (ie. if Samsung failed, South Korea's economy would take a massive hit?)
They are both true. If Samsung faltered, the Korean economy would take a hit, but the government would almost certainly prop it up such that it wouldn't actually fail.
Presumably a bailout would take the form of an injection of liquidity sourced from sovereign debt denominated in KRW, much like the US bank bailout a few years ago. If it were large enough, it could depress the won against other global currencies. In the limiting case, the Koreans can always -- if they really need to -- print money until their exports get attractive again. People may not want to buy Samsung phones, but they'll certainly buy Samsung steel or Samsung heavy industrial equipment, if the price is right.
Countries can do this funny thing called "print money" to save failing businesses. Sure, that's bad for the economy too, but potentially better than the alternative.
Yes, Samsung is going to suffer, that's certain. But failing, as in going bankrupt? No. They are simply too important for South Korea to let them go bankrupt.
But you backpedalled on that point already as well, and no one, even the biggest fanboy, would argue that they are not going to have large problems. Like every large company somewhere on its track.
They are too big to fail. Worst case the government would step in and bail them out. If they failed the all their suppliers would be hurt it would be shockwave through the Korean economy. Same reason why US bailed out AIG, GM, etc.
They are also a sort of crown jewel for South Korea, and probably far above the "too big to fail" threshold there. If worse came to worst, they'd be bailed out by the government.
They're not going anywhere as a corporation.
I'd expect a certain amount of bloodletting in their leadership, depending on exactly how bad the recall and consequent damage to their mobile electronics business is. But it's not an existential threat to the entire organization.
They make everything from cutting edge phones to air-conditioning. One product in one business area going wrong like this is not going to be fatal.