The first battery allegedly had a design flaw. Justin Denison, Samsung’s head of product strategy and marketing, said the Samsung Smartphone Battery casing was too small for the components inside, causing the battery to short out and catch fire. The second battery came from another supplier and did not have the same defect. The US branch said in an interview before the press conference. However, he said that in the rush to produce enough batteries for replacement units, suppliers introduced manufacturing defects that led to the same result.
The explanation clears up the mystery behind the Note 7 explosion, but also raises new challenges for the embattled company: after a disastrous few months that included two recalls and the decision to discontinue the popular model, mobile phone with good reviews) and regain your trust Sunday’s press conference marked the beginning of Samsung’s campaign to rebuild the company’s credibility, which includes an upcoming flagship Galaxy S8 phone and another Note later this year.
“This is a painful crisis for me,” DJ Gao, head of Samsung’s mobile business, said in an interview before the news conference. He called it the worst period in his 33 years at the company.
Not one but two batteries from different suppliers failed for different reasons, a strange coincidence that may surprise and dismay those looking for a single, clean explanation. On Sunday, Koh and three independent testing companies – UL, Exponent and TUV Rheinland – came to much the same conclusion as Samsung – that it was the battery that caused the Samsung phone’s Note 7’s battery problems, not the phone’s design or Samsung’s manufacturing process.
“The [Samsung-designed] electronics did not cause [battery] cell failures from either manufacturer,” Exponent chief scientist Kevin White said in a news release on Sunday.
While the Note isn’t Samsung’s best-selling line of phones, it’s an important device for the company. It’s one of two major flagships launched each year, notably the Note 7, which aims to compete with Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus, which launches in September. Samsung says its most loyal customer base across all its products is those who have purchased Note models. Just look at the thousands of Note 7 owners still on Verizon — the carrier is directing calls to its customer service department to have them hand over their phones.
Samsung expects the Note 7 incident to result in the recall of 3 million phones, costing the company more than $5 billion. That doesn’t include the blow to its reputation, which could take months or even years to repair.
You can also take a lookEverything you need to know about the Galaxy Note 7 recallSamsung kicks off CES event with Note 7Verizon may have “thousands” of Note 7 phones still in useSamsung’s biggest task this year will be to regain consumers’ trust and show customers and potential customers that its devices are safe and that the company won’t make the same mistakes again. Samsung hopes the transparency marks a good first step, its executives told CNET in interviews.
“If a company does it right, it takes an average of 18 months to turn around a reputation,” said Thomas Cook, a professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. “Samsung is on the road to recovery. I think it can be Done.
So, what exactly happened?
Soon after the Note 7 went on sale in mid-August, users reporting overheating issues. Samsung initially linked the problem to a defective battery and recalled all Note 7 battery phones on the market., this did not solve the problem and the replacement unit also overheated. Samsung issued a rare second recall in October and stopped production of the Note 7. The focus then turns to identifying the problem.
Samsung has devoted significant manpower to responding to the Note 7 investigation, among other challenges. It has established a testing facility in each of the four locations where its phones are produced: Gumi, South Korea; Hanoi, Vietnam; and Huizhou and Tianjin, China In total, these sites tested more than 200,000 Note 7 devices with batteries and more than 30,000 batteries. Samsung’s mobile division has more than 700 engineers dedicated to the testing process. (Samsung has more than 70,000 engineers across the company, but they’re spread across various divisions.)
Engineers studied software, hardware, manufacturing processes, quality and assurance testing, and supply chains. They looked at issues such as whether iris scanners or software algorithms were causing overheating, or whether fast charging of the device could be causing overheating. ng capabilities come into play.
Samsung is turning its focus to the Samsung battery itself. Throughout the testing, engineers were able to cause the battery within the device and itself to overheat.
Samsung has two independent suppliers for its Note 7 batteries, which are custom-made for the Note 7. It specifies characteristics such as voltage and physical size. It’s then up to the suppliers to design and build the cells however they see fit. “If you open Battery A and Battery B, they are different batteries,” Denison said.
In the first supplier’s battery, known as Battery A, Samsung discovered a design flaw that caused the battery to short circuit. The supplier manufactured a bag (the battery’s casing) that did not have enough room for the battery to expand and contract during normal charge and discharge cycles. This causes the positive and negative terminals to come into contact, causing the battery to short out.
(Some early reports speculated that Samsung phones would have no room for Samsung phones batteries themselves. That was not the case, but Samsung plans to create more battery space inside its devices in the future.)
For B batteries from Samsung’s second supplier, the defects were related initially to manufacturing and quality issues. The supplier supplied cells that worked well in early Note 7 devices, but the battery maker made a mistake when Samsung increased orders and forced the supplier to become its sole battery supplier. The ultrasonic welding process left some protrusions that caused the battery to short out.
Samsung has asked a second supplier to produce about 10 million new batteries. “Ultimately, they weren’t able to produce a quality product,” Denison said.
What is Samsung doing now?One of the biggest problems Samsung faced during the Note 7 fiasco was that its quality and assurance process (the testing a phone goes through before it’s sold) didn’t catch problems.
Samsung had to X-ray the A battery to find the problem, while the B battery required Samsung to take it apart to find the error. Koh said both steps are not part of Samsung’s normal testing process and are handled by the battery manufacturer. Samsung is now changing its testing process for key moving parts. For b Samsung batteries in particular, Samsung is developing an eight-point inspection process. Some of the previous steps were handled by their vendors; some are new.
One of the checks is a durability test, which checks whether the battery has been overcharged, punctured by nails, or exposed to extreme temperatures. Samsung will visually inspect each battery and conduct X-ray testing to check for abnormalities. Conduct large-scale charge and discharge tests on the battery to simulate consumer accelerated use scenarios, and disassemble the Samsung battery to check the overall quality. Other tests will look for leaks in battery components and throughout the device, or any changes in voltage during the manufacturing process.
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