Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech, Cain Geoffrey

Based on years of reporting on Samsung for The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and Time, from his base in South Korea, and his countless sources inside and outside the company, Geoffrey Cain offers a penetrating look behind the curtains of the biggest company nobody in America knows. Seen for decades in tech circles as a fast follower rather than an innovation leader, Samsung today has grown to become a market leader in the United States and around the globe. They have captured one quarter of the smartphone market and have been pushing the envelope on every front.

Forty years ago, Samsung was a rickety Korean agricultural conglomerate that produced sugar, paper, and fertilizer, located in a backward country with a third-world economy. But with the rise of the PC revolution, Chairman Lee Byung-chul began a bold experiment: to make Samsung a major supplier of computer chips. The multimillion- dollar plan was incredibly risky. But Lee, wowed by a young Steve Jobs, who sat down with the chairman to offer his advice, became obsessed with creating a tech empire. And in Samsung Rising, we follow Samsung behind the scenes as the company fought its way to the top of tech. It is one of Apples chief suppliers of technology critical to the iPhone, and its own Galaxy phone outsells the iPhone.

Today, Samsung employs over 300,000 people (compared to Apples 80,000 and Googles 48,000). The companys revenues have grown more than forty times from that of 1987 and make up more than 20 percent of South Koreas exports. Yet their disastrous recall of the Galaxy Note 7, with numerous reports of phones spontaneously bursting into flames, reveals the dangers of the companys headlong attempt to overtake Apple at any cost.