Samsung hasn’t had the best year financially but it’s not slowing down its spending on R&D. BusinessKorea reports that Samsung spent an astonishing $13.8 billion in research and development in 2014, the single largest R&D investment in the company’s history.
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Until recently, many cynics would have argued that Samsung was obviously wasting its money since its only payoff from these kinds of massive investments for a while seemed to be shallow gimmicks such as the Galaxy Gear, the Galaxy Round and the Galaxy Note Edge. However, the Galaxy S6 edge has been turning a lot of heads ever since it was unveiled at Mobile World Congress this year, which may indicate that the company’s big R&D bets are starting to yield tangible results for the first time in a while.
Interestingly, it seems that this increase in R&D spending came at the expense of Samsung’s Advertising Death Star, which BusinessKorea says saw its budget slashed by nearly 10% year-over-year. More quality products and fewer advertisements sounds like a winning formula to us, although we won’t know for a while whether Samsung has something even better up its sleeve than the Galaxy S6 edge.
