Samsung seeks a ban on Apple products

Samsung and Apple are the world’s two biggest manufacturers of smartphones, and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab has become a huge-selling rival to the iPad, which has dominated the growing market for the touchscreen devices. Rather than focus on competing with each other on price or promotion, the two are focusing on features of their products and at each other’s throats at the moment over allegations of breach of patent. In the current round of claim and counter claim, Apple started it in April by accusing Samsung of copying its smartphones and tablet computers. Apple claimed that the Galaxy phones and tablets ‘slavishly’ copied its own designs for icons and other design features, while Samsung said that the look of their products was the results of market research and not copying. Later in April Samsung responded with their own claim that Apple was copying Samsung features in the area of wireless communications standards and mobile device user interface, and breaking patent legislation in five countries. The escalation has now reached the stage at which Samsung has asked the US International Trade Commission to ban the import of Apple products into the United States.

This is a pretty extraordinary idea! Samsung are very self-righteous about it in their statement which says that “Samsung will vigorously defend our intellectual property to protect our role as a leader and innovator in the mobile communication business in order to better serve our customers,” but it is hard to imagine that they will actually succeed in persuading the authorities to prevent Apple from bringing its products into the US, and the whole thing may be an unnecessary distraction for both companies from the business of competing with each other to gain sales in the marketplace. As analyst Tim Charlton of Charlton Media has said in the BBC’s report, “...it will be very difficulty for a judge to decide how a company’s products should be designed,” and Apple may not be able to dictate how Samsung’s gadgets should look.

And further, the two companies are surprisingly interdependent: Samsung provides microchips for Apple’s products, and according to the Independent, “Apple was Samsung’s second-largest client in 2010 after Japan’s Sony, accounting for four percent of the South Korean firm’s 155 trillion won ($142 billion) annual revenue.” Given those figures, it is unlikely that Apple could easily find another supplier of sufficient numbers of such a vital component in a hurry, and also that Samsung could afford to lose Apple as a major customer. So it seems a dangerous game that each is playing, as they face up to each other and pour resources into the legal battle over design. Is there a risk that, while their focus is on each other, another manufacturer might creep up on the inside and take them by surprise?