BlackBerry vs Samsung

Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin founded Research In Motion in a Waterloo, Ontario garage in 1984. Lazaridis had a vision of wirelessly connected devices at a time when the concept seemed purely theoretical. The company spent its first decade building wireless infrastructure components for other companies, generating enough revenue to fund Lazaridis's real obsession: a handheld device that could send and receive email wirelessly.

RIM launched the BlackBerry 850 in 1999 — a pager-sized device with a tiny QWERTY keyboard that could send and receive emails wirelessly. Corporate executives who had previously been unreachable when away from their desks were now permanently connected. The device became so addictive that users nicknamed it the "CrackBerry." By 2007, BlackBerry had 8 million subscribers and was the dominant device for business communication worldwide. Barack Obama was so attached to his BlackBerry that the Secret Service had to negotiate terms for him to keep it after becoming President.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January 2007, RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said he was not worried — the iPhone lacked the security and enterprise features that BlackBerry's corporate customers required. Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis agreed, adding that the iPhone's battery life was inadequate. Both assessments were partially correct. Both turned out to be irrelevant. Consumers chose the iPhone anyway, and enterprise IT departments followed their employees. BlackBerry's market share fell from approximately 50% to under 1% in six years.

BlackBerry abandoned smartphone hardware manufacturing in 2016 — ending the device that had defined it — and pivoted entirely to enterprise software and cybersecurity. The company's QNX operating system, which runs in over 235 million vehicles worldwide, became its most valuable asset. BlackBerry also developed cybersecurity software for government and enterprise clients, building a business that was profitable but a fraction of the company's former scale.

By 2025, BlackBerry had transformed into a software company focused on endpoint security, automotive embedded systems, and government cybersecurity — with revenue around $500 million annually. The physical keyboard that had once been the most influential human-computer interface in business history was a collector's item. The company that had been Barack Obama's favourite phone and the most addictive device in corporate history was now a mid-sized software vendor that most of its former users had forgotten entirely.

Lee Byung-chul founded Samsung — meaning "three stars" in Korean — in 1938 in Suwon, South Korea as a small trading company selling dried fish, vegetables, and noodles. The company had 40 employees. Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. Lee expanded into sugar refining, wool, and insurance in the 1940s and 1950s, building Samsung into one of Korea's first major conglomerates — known as a chaebol — through relationships with the postwar South Korean government.

Samsung entered the electronics business in 1969, initially making black-and-white televisions under licence from Japanese manufacturers. The South Korean government's industrial policy actively supported chaebol expansion into strategic industries, providing cheap loans and trade protection. Samsung Electronics grew rapidly by producing consumer electronics for export — initially as an OEM manufacturer for foreign brands. The relationship between Samsung and the South Korean state has remained close and occasionally controversial ever since.

Lee Byung-chul announced Samsung would enter the semiconductor business in 1983 — a decision that Korean banking analysts considered reckless. Samsung had no semiconductor expertise, no technology, and would be competing against Japanese and American companies with decades of advantage. Lee invested $100 million of his personal fortune and sent engineers to study American chip manufacturers. Within a decade, Samsung was the world's largest producer of DRAM memory chips. The bet became one of the most successful industrial strategy decisions in economic history.

Samsung had manufactured components for Apple — processors, displays, and memory — since the original iPhone. In 2010, Samsung launched the Galaxy S smartphone directly competing with the iPhone, while remaining Apple's largest supplier. The two companies spent years simultaneously as each other's biggest customer and biggest competitor. In 2016, Samsung launched the Galaxy Note 7 to acclaim — until batteries began catching fire. Samsung recalled 2.5 million devices, replaced them, then recalled the replacements when they also caught fire. Airlines banned the Note 7. Samsung permanently discontinued it, writing off $5.3 billion. CEO Lee Jae-yong was arrested on bribery charges months later.

Samsung reported full-year 2025 revenues of KRW 333.6 trillion — approximately $230 billion — and operating profit of KRW 43.6 trillion, up 33% from 2024. The Q4 2025 performance was historic: quarterly revenue of KRW 93.8 trillion and operating profit of KRW 20.1 trillion — tripling year-on-year — driven by surging AI data center demand for memory chips. Samsung's chip division alone generated KRW 16.4 trillion in Q4 operating profit. Samsung had finally received Nvidia approval for its HBM3E high-bandwidth memory chips after lagging behind SK Hynix, and had begun sampling its next-generation HBM4. The company that had started selling dried fish in 1938 was now the world's largest memory chip manufacturer, supplying the AI infrastructure that was remaking the global economy.