- Apple is preparing to power the iPhone with Apple Intelligence.
- Samsung is ready to fight back with the Galaxy AI.
- The South Korean company is set to unveil new AI features as it enters the battle against Apple.
For over a decade, South Korea's most powerful leaders Business conglomerate It could take pride in its superiority over Silicon Valley's most powerful smartphone makers.
Samsung, which hails from the city of Suwon, is a family-led giant of South Korea's industrial sector and has overtaken Apple to become the world's largest smartphone seller.
While Americans generally prefer the iPhone, the rest of the world has favored Samsung's competitively priced Android devices. But that all changed last year.
Figures released in January by data firm IDC showed that Apple is on track to capture 20.1% of the global smartphone market by the end of 2023, overtaking Samsung for the first time in 12 years.
Samsung has been hit in part by factors affecting its overall smartphone business: IDC estimates shipments will fall 3.2% to 1.17 billion units in 2023, signaling less consumer willingness to upgrade, especially as inflation rises.
Samsung is also facing difficulties at home.
Lee Jae-yong, chairman of Samsung Electronics, the company's most important division, and South Korea's richest man with a net worth of $11 billion, according to Bloomberg, has been embroiled in bribery and financial crime scandals since the mid-2010s.
In 2017, Lee was convicted of bribery charges related to then-President Park Geun-hye, but after serving a short prison term, he was pardoned in 2022. Earlier this year, in a separate case, Lee was acquitted of stock price manipulation and accounting fraud charges.
Samsung has now moved past that drama and is focused on the most important industry development in years: artificial intelligence and the upcoming new smartphone war with Apple.
Samsung prepares for the AI era
The South Korean company is hoping to attract all eyes as it prepares to unveil “the next frontier” of its AI ambitions at an event dubbed “Galaxy Unpacked” in Paris on Wednesday.
Timing is very important.
Last month, Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence, a vision for generative AI that will overhaul its devices, with which the company hopes consumers will be able to upgrade their iPhones to access a suite of AI features.
These features include an improved Siri, tools to enhance email and messaging, image creation support, and the integration of OpenAI's ChatGPT into the operating systems of iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
For Apple, which faces stiff competition in key markets like China, Apple Intelligence is a big bet that the company's AI efforts will be so appealing to consumers that they'll be willing to upgrade their phones to take advantage of it (only new models like the iPhone 15 Pro and upcoming iPhone 16 series will offer Apple Intelligence).
For Samsung, that means it also has to get serious about AI: When the company launched its flagship Galaxy S24 series in January, it unveiled Galaxy AI, its first foray into generative AI capabilities for its own devices.
Galaxy AI includes features such as Google's “circle to search,” which allows users to search what is displayed on the screen, as well as live translation tools for calls and enhanced photo editing capabilities.
While Apple is encouraging users to upgrade to newer devices if they want access to its best AI features, Samsung appears to be taking a different approach.
Galaxy AI has already been rolled out to older smartphones like the S23 and Z Fold5, and Samsung is aiming to make the AI feature available as soon as possible and as widely as possible, giving existing Samsung users the opportunity to appreciate the AI and buy another Samsung device when it's time to upgrade next.
There are already signs that Samsung is making a comeback.
Samsung Electronics on Friday forecast its second-quarter operating profit would rise sharply to about 10.4 trillion won ($7.54 billion) from 670 billion won ($485 million) a year earlier.
Samsung again overtook Apple to become the world's top smartphone seller in the first three months of the year, according to IDC data, but with the caveat that its sales were boosted by the launch of a flagship product in a quarter in which Apple did not announce any new products of its own.
The South Korean company's hope now is that its vision for AI will help it stay ahead of Apple throughout the year.
Samsung said Wednesday's announcement marks the start of “a new era in mobile AI” and that it hopes it will once again become king of the smartphone AI era.
