For two weeks last month, Kim Young-ha, chief executive of Samsung Electronics China, was unavailable for meetings at his Beijing office. He was instead travelling 5,000km by road through rural China, visiting Samsung stores in cities as far-flung as Mianyang in the west and Xinhui, to the south.
Mr Kim’s road trip is part of his efforts, since becoming chief executive two years ago, to localise Samsung’s operations in China and to extend the South Korean company’s sales and distribution networks far into the Chinese countryside.
It is a strategy that has paid off spectacularly, with Samsung last year taking the biggest market share in China for mobile phones, smartphones, and televisions. In smartphones in particular, Samsung has a big lead over Apple with a 30 per cent share in the world’s biggest smartphone market compared with Apple’s 10 per cent, says Song Jong-ho, analyst at Daewoo Securities.