Sony reaffirmed its intention to become a car maker at CES recently, showing an electric saloon that it is creating with Honda.
Are we excited that a global tech giant will enter the industry? Of course. Are we also surprised? Yes and no.
Way back when, many Japanese giants of industry leapt across the vast financial chasm, landed on their feet and managed to run, but in the modern era, Yamaha has twice shied away and none of Hitachi, Kawasaki or Panasonic has ever publicly countenanced the idea.
In China, meanwhile, the disasters suffered by Evergrande and LeEco counterbalance the present optimism of Huawei and Xiaomi. And then there’s South Korea: Hyundai and Kia eventually enjoyed success, but Samsung and Daewoo really didn’t. Yes, even the nation’s two biggest ‘chaebols’ failed – but then they did have bloody awful luck.
Samsung was founded in 1938 to sell groceries, but it expanded quickly into many varied fields as South Korea grew from a war-torn agricultural society into a wealthy industrial one at dizzying speed.
By the time its founder died in 1987, it was a big name in heavy industry, engineering and electronics – and his heir recognised that the car industry was essentially a combination of the three.
In 1993, six years after Lee Kun-hee floated the idea, Samsung tried to do things the easy way through a hostile takeover of Kia, but this was blocked by the authorities.
Its back-up plan was a collaboration deal with cash-strapped Nissan that was signed in 1994, resulting in the foundation of a commercial vehicle company and a car maker.
Samsung had actually been working on an electric car for a little while but played safe with its first production car, rebadging Nissan’s five-year-old A32 – known to most as the Maxima and to Brits as the QX, a soul-suckingly bland big barge with four-cylinder or V6 petrol power – to be built at a shiny new £1.8 billion factory in Busan with an annual capacity of 240,000.
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