Samsung Reflection

This reflection is about „The Paradox of Samsung’s Rise“ written by Khanna, T. Song, J. and Lee, K. published in The Globe in 2011 pp. 142-148 and the way Samsung became successful over a comparably brief period time. Over the past 20 years Samsung changed from a low-cost original equipment manufacturer to a world leader in research and development, marketing strategy and design. It is clear that this article was written to tell the readers about the background leading to the success of Samsung today.

The first cause is the integration of Western business practices into their own Japanese practices, so Samsung would not only be successful in Japan, but in the Western part of the world as well. Secondly the employees of Samsung were enticed

Another advantage of this article is that it is well written, in a neatly structured way, while using clear language and maintaining the reader’s attention. After reading the article you will have a better view of the success of Samsung, which strategy was used and how Samsung executed this strategy. Enough background information about Samsung is provided to help create a better general understanding of the company. This article also clarifies that if a business wants to be globally successful, it has to adopt various divergent practices. Therefore, this article is relevant to the content of introduction to international business as the international problems which Samsung faced are explained alongside the solutions. Furthermore, this article is quite recent (2011) and is about emerging economies, which is still current in our global economy. Another aspect is that the authors added extra information such as images with useful content clarifying the combination between the Western system and the Japanese system. Unfortunately, the article also has a few aspects which were not as satisfying. To begin with, nearly all the content discussed in the introduction is covered in the following text, which is great. However, there is not much more information about the paradox of Samsung’s rise discussed in the text after the introduction, which strikes us as odd since the paradox is the title of the article. Nevertheless, this is the only issue with the introduction which is not clearly stated or discussed in the rest of the article. Furthermore, the sources of the facts which were used for the arguments are unclear. The authors do not refer to anything at all so it remains uncertain if these facts are correct or not. So there is no guarantee that any of the numbers mentioned have been based on substantial evidence or research.