In a move that could cost the company billions, not to mention the priceless goodwill of the market, Samsung has completely halted production of the Galaxy Note 7. After the ‘safe units’ started to catch fire, the South Korean electronics giant was forced to shut down its manufacturing engine off for pure safety reasons. Now, a fresh report states that Samsung’s move is mostly because it has no clue on what is causing the fire, and its team of hundreds of engineers are stumped. The main cause of halt in production and uncertainty of future moves is because the Samsung team is unable to isolate the cause of these explosions.
The New York Times cites an anonymous internal source from the company, and claims that after the safe units started catching fire, Samsung’s entire engineering team went back to work to find a solution, but hasn’t found one even after conducting many tests for over a week.
Early in August, Samsung had touted the Galaxy Note 7 to be the best Note device so far, and had even broken tradition to launch it a bit early to fend off competition from Apple. However, the move backfired terribly, and reports of many Samsung Galaxy Note 7 units exploding while on charge started coming in. Samsung had to then stop sales temporarily to assess the issue. Soon after, the company reportedly blamed an in-house SDI battery fault to be the cause of the problem, and restarted production and sales by sticking to one of its third-party battery providers. It even started to recall old handsets as a safety measure, and replaced them with new ‘safe units’.
However, safe units also started catching fire, and because Samsung was unable to find a solution, it just decided to halt production and global sales. It gave up trying to stay afloat without a life jacket, and just surrendered in silence.
Whether Samsung should bring back the Note 7 or kill it altogether for safety reasons is another debate altogether, but these series of events and the damage it has done to the brand’s reputation will take some time to recover. Furthermore, because of this fault, Samsung’s other product lines like refrigerators and washing machines are also now in the scanner.
The Galaxy Note 7 has managed to cause a scare on planes, set a jeep on fire, and incurred damages of $1,400 to a hotel. While investigators take their time to find the new flaw, we just hope that casualties remain to a minimum, and that Samsung does everything in its power to remove these hazardous units off the market.
[“source-ndtv”]