Samsung Electronics Co.’s challenger to Google software is moving from phones to big-screen TVs as the South Korean company tries to capitalise on the burgeoning interest in smart homes.
The world’s biggest maker of TVs will unveil the first sets powered by Tizen software at the Consumer Electronics Show this week, and all the Web-connected models it sells this year will run the operating system. The company also may demonstrate at CES how the TVs communicate with its washing machines, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners.
The controlling Lee family is trying to reinvent Samsung as a purveyor of Internet-connected appliances to grab share of a market that may be worth $7.1 trillion by 2020. Samsung wants to generate revenue from Tizen applications and services just as Apple and Google do from their operating systems, and the company is emphasizing TVs and consumer electronics after falling a year behind schedule on a Tizen-based phone.
“In smartphones, there’s no chance that Samsung’s Tizen can edge out the two dominant operating systems,” said Claire Kim, a Seoul-based analyst at Daishin Securities Co. “But in TVs, Samsung may have a chance.”
Samsung’s rise to No. 1 in global phone sales depended on Google’s Android. Nearly all of the 243 million smartphones Samsung shipped through Sept. 30 ran the software, which Google typically gives away in return for mobile advertising revenue and a share of app sales.
Samsung faces the strongest challenge to its phone supremacy after posting the smallest quarterly earnings in more than two years. Operating profit at the mobile-phone unit, the company’s biggest cash generator, slumped 74% in the September quarter and sales fell about 33%.
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