The company will probably be able to salvage a good portion of the hardware for their future projects – after all, if it’s just the batteries that need to be taken out, the rest should still be good. But this will still take its toll on them, no matter how much they may try to mitigate the costs.
This is certainly a very bad and unlucky development for Samsung, and it just goes to show how fragile a company’s position on this market is. It’s entirely possible that Samsung will feel the aftereffects of this incident for a long time, and this could be the perfect opportunity for some of their competitors to overtake them.
We’re already seeing a surge of jokes about exploding Samsung devices, and this could even become a meme among Internet users. Something which would definitely not work out in Samsung’s favor. If they become known for this in a similar fashion to Nokia’s reputation for indestructibility, this could have a very real effect on the company’s sales, and not for a short period either.
For now, we’re watching the situation unfold and hoping that Samsung will get things under control reasonably fast. There is a lot at stake here, and one slip-up could potentially cost Samsung their entire future on the smartphone market, and that’s not an exaggeration. Considering that they have become something like an icon for high-end Android devices recently, this could be a disaster for the Android corner of the smartphone world as a whole.