Samsung blames Galaxy Note 7 fires on faulty batteries
The world’s biggest smartphone maker Samsung blamed faulty batteries on Monday for the fires that led to last year’s humiliating recall of its flagship Galaxy Note 7 device.
Samsung Electronics was forced to discontinue the smartphone, originally intended to compete with Apple’s iPhone, after a chaotic recall that saw replacement devices also catching fire.
The debacle cost the South Korean company billions in lost profit and reputational damage, in a torrid period which has also seen it embroiled in the corruption scandal that has resulted in President Park Geun-Hye’s impeachment.
Internal and independent investigations “concluded that batteries were found to be the cause of the Note 7 incidents”, Samsung said in a statement.
“We sincerely apologise for the discomfort and concern we have caused to our customers,” Koh DongJin, the head of its mobile business, told reporters in Seoul. Samsung Electronics is the most prominent unit of the giant Samsung group, South Korea’s largest conglomerate with a revenue equivalent to about a fifth of the country’s GDP.
It announced a recall of 2.5 million units of the oversized Galaxy Note 7 in September 2016 after several devices exploded or caught fire, with the company blaming batteries from a supplier, widely believed to be its sister firm Samsung SDI.
When replacement phones — with batteries from another firm, largely thought to be Chinese manufacturer ATL — also started to combust, the company eventually decided to kill off the Note 7 for good.
As many as 1.9 million of the phones were sold in the United States, where authorities banned the device from use on planes and even from being placed in checked luggage. Aviation authorities around the world issued similar prohibitions.
The firm has since embarked on a campaign to restore its battered reputation, issuing repeating apologies and putting full-page advertisements in prominent US newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post admitting that it “fell short” on its promises.
The next model in the series, the Galaxy Note 8, had been expected to be unveiled at next month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but Koh said it would be delayed to ensure that it had no safety issues.