Motorola vs Samsung

Paul Galvin and his brother Joseph founded the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in Chicago in 1928 with $565 in capital. Their breakthrough came with car radios. They named the product Motorola — a portmanteau of "motor" and "Victrola" — suggesting music in motion. The name became so associated with quality that the company adopted it as its corporate name in 1947.

On April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first mobile phone call in history from a street corner in New York City. The device weighed 1.1 kilograms and offered 30 minutes of talk time before requiring 10 hours of recharging. Cooper called Joel Engel, his counterpart at AT&T Bell Labs — Motorola's rival in the race to build a portable phone. "Joel," Cooper said, "I'm calling you from a cellular phone, and it's a real cellular phone, a handheld, portable, real cellular phone."

Motorola launched the StarTAC in 1996 — the world's first clamshell mobile phone, weighing just 88 grams. It was the must-have device of the late 1990s. Motorola held over 50% of the U.S. mobile phone market. The company was at its peak. Within a decade, it would be unrecognisable.

Motorola invested $5 billion in Iridium — a satellite phone network requiring 66 low-earth orbit satellites. The concept was visionary: a phone that worked anywhere on earth. The execution was disastrous. By the time Iridium launched in 1998, terrestrial mobile networks had expanded to cover most places where people actually lived. The $3,000 handsets were heavy and could not be used indoors. Iridium filed for bankruptcy in 1999, fourteen months after launch. The U.S. military eventually bought the network for $25 million.

Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2011 for $12.5 billion — primarily to obtain Motorola's 17,000 mobile patents, which Google needed to defend Android against Apple and Microsoft lawsuits. Google sold Motorola to Lenovo three years later for $2.91 billion, having extracted the patents it needed. The company that had invented the mobile phone was sold for less than a quarter of what Google had paid. Motorola Solutions — the public safety and enterprise communications division — continued separately, becoming a profitable $20 billion company serving police, emergency services, and government agencies. The consumer phone brand lived on as a Lenovo subsidiary, producing budget Android phones with declining relevance.

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.