Samsung ends in-house broadcasting

By Yoon Sung-won

Samsung has stopped all group-wide internal communication channels following the disbandment of the conglomerate’s strategy-setting control tower, group officials said Friday.

The nation’s largest conglomerate dissolved its 28-year-old in-house broadcaster ― Samsung Broadcasting Center (SBC) ― as of Thursday.

“Now that the Corporate Strategy Office is gone, we are closing in-house broadcasting,” a Samsung official said. “Affiliates will continue their own respective in-house broadcasts.”

The group introduced the SBC in 1989. Broadcasts were aired twice a week in the morning for 10 to 15 minutes. They mainly introduced affiliates, their diverse departments and occupational groups.

“The broadcast facilitated communication among affiliates and employees,” said an office worker at a Samsung Group affiliate, Friday. “Most employees stay in an office to work, and so it was good to know what other workers at group affiliates did.”

The in-house broadcasting has also been used as a channel for whistle-blowing. In 1993, the SBC reporting team filmed a video of Samsung Electronics’ washing machine manufacturing plant workers fabricating defective products as ones with fair quality. In the video, the workers tried to shape a defective lid of a washing machine with a knife.

Responding to the whistle-blowing broadcast, Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee summoned about 200 executives to Frankfurt, Germany, on June 7 in 2013 to deliver what the conglomerate called its New Management Initiative.

“We won’t survive without painful changes,” Lee said in a speech, which was also called the Frankfurt Declaration. “Advanced countries, companies will dominate the market in the coming four to five years.” At that time, Lee also famously said, “Change everything except for your wife and children.”

Later in June and July last year, the SBC released a White Paper on Samsung’s software competitiveness and argued that the Korean conglomerate lagged far behind global giants such as Google in terms of software development capability.

The group’s other communication channels face the same fate as the SBC. The group’s new letter service was stopped as of Thursday. Its website and official blog are scheduled to close April 3.

Samsung Group said it will no longer provide the Samsung Campus Talk, a career counseling program for collegians. The group will also discontinue overseas study programs or transfers of managers to other affiliates.

The Samsung affiliate source said many working-level employees will miss the in-house broadcast.

“Besides introducing the work of other affiliates, the broadcast offered other useful and interesting information such as tips for simple exercises that we could do while working,” he said. “It also helped us learn about the company that we work at, which I believe was good.”

Another employee at Samsung Electronics said, “I understand that such decisions have been made for a good purpose. The changes may not have a significant influence on our daily work, but the overseas training opportunities and recreational events will be missed by many employees.”