Samsung has officially ended its production of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phone. The announcement occurred after multiple reports of the Note 7 phones exploding. After various inspections and investigations on the phone, the battery was the perceived reason for the phones catching fire.
“For the benefit of consumers’ safety, we stopped sales and exchanges of the Galaxy Note 7 and have consequently decided to stop production,” a Samsung spokeswoman said in a statement released by the company.
Samsung initially released the Note 7 for sale in South Korea, the United States and eight other markets on Aug. 19. The first report of a Note 7 exploding was in South Korea on Aug. 24, just five days after the release.
On Sept. 2, Samsung recalled 2.5 million Note 7 phones with batteries manufactured by Samsung SDI, a Samsung subsidiary, due to safety concerns about the phone overheating and potentially exploding.
At the time, engineers and analysts who were working on resolving the issue believed that the SDI battery was the cause of the hazard. Because of this, the company still allowed replacement phones with batteries made by Amperex Technology Ltd. (ATL) to be sold.
Two weeks later on Sept. 16, a Florida man sued Samsung for leg burns from a phone explosion. Three days after that, a user in China reported that a Note 7 phone caught fire. Nevertheless, ATL, the replacement phone battery manufacturer, denied that the fire was due to a manufacturing defect.
On Oct. 6, a Southwest Airlines flight from Louisville, Ky. to Baltimore was evacuated as a result of a Note 7 overheating and smoke being emitted from the phone. The phone was actually a replacement phone with the ATL battery after the owner had previously returned his SDI battery-powered Samsung Galaxy Note 7.
Three days later, T-Mobile announced that they would stop selling new Note 7 phones, a major blow to the sales of the Note 7.
Furthermore, Samsung issued a second recall of Note 7 phones, suggesting that there was a bigger problem with the phone than just the battery made by both Samsung SDI and ATL.
“The fact that we are dealing with potentially a second recall on top of a first recall is not your normal situation and indicative of a less-than-ideal process that should have involved earlier coordination with the government,” Elliot Kaye, chairman of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, said, according to The New York Times.
Samsung continued to try to accurately diagnose the problem, but the phone testers were only allowed to communicate with each other offline, as the company was wary of potential lawsuits.
“The problem seems to be far more complex. In a race to surpass iPhone, Samsung seems to have packed it with so much innovation it became uncontrollable,” Park Chul-wan, former director of the Center for Advanced Batteries at the Korea Electronics Technology Institute, said in an interview with The New York Times.
For Samsung, it seems that their ambition to innovate will set the company back not only for the sales of their new phone, but also with customer and investor trust — the stock price fell eight percent on the day they announced that Note 7 production would be stopped.
However, some others think that Samsung may have helped themselves by completely shutting down production. Typically, companies will try to improve a defective product; To stop production and deem it a failure is something unprecedented.
“They made a really intelligent, hard choice that saved their brand and prevented what could have been a complete melting down of all the goodwill they had built over the last five years,” Eric Schiffer, chairman of Reputation Management Consultants, said to The New York Times.
How Samsung will rebuild that trust remains unknown.
