Is Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (005930)’s Success All Marketing, or Something Else?

Samsung’s component advantage has helped the company flood the market with variations of its devices. While other companies may find it difficult to create multiple versions of smartphones and phablets at different sizes, Samsung can utilize its production to bring a slew of devices to market at many different price points.

The other side to Samsung’s manufacturing success is making components for other companies — including Apple. Over the past few years, Samsung has made applications processors, flash memory, DRM memory, and displays for the company. For obvious reasons, Apple has attempted to move away from Samsung for some of its components, but even now, the difficult relationship remains between the two.

Aside from component manufacturing, Samsung also has marketing prowess that’s helped propel the company to the top of the mobile market. The company spent $402 million marketing its smartphones in the U.S. last year — beating Apple’s $333 million for iPhone marketing. Consequently, it was hard getting through 2012 without seeing at least a handful of Samsung commercials.

The company’s advertising has helped solidify its brand into the minds of mobile consumers, and has helped push the company into the top smartphone spot. In the first quarter of 2013, Samsung captured 32.7% of the global smartphone market share, with Apple following with 17.3%. One of Samsung’s ads — famously mocking a line of Apple fanboys — was the most-viewed tech ad in 2012, and has been viewed more than 17 million times on YouTube.

No simple answer
Samsung’s smartphone success comes from much more than its marketing budget — though that’s a big part of it. The company has the capability to create lots of products, adapt Android’s operating system to its liking, throw gobs of money marketing its devices, and make money creating components for its competitors at the same time.

Add to all that the foresight Samsung had to mimic Apple’s products at the opportune time, and you have the beginnings of Samsung’s success. For now, it seems the company will continue to enjoy its status in the mobile world — at least until someone else comes along and parrots what Samsung’s doing.

The article Is Samsung’s Success All Marketing, or Something Else? originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Chris Neiger.

Fool contributor Chris Neiger has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Apple. The Motley Fool owns shares of Apple and Microsoft.

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