There was an elephant in the room this afternoon as Tim Baxter, President and COO of Samsung Electronics America walked out on stage at the Consumer Electronics Show 2017 to kick off Samsung's press conference. While many would have expected Samsung to simply not mention the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, Baxter started off by addressing the elephant in the room.
“As you know, this year was a challenging year for Samsung. Some of you were directly impacted and some certainly saw the media coverage especially about the Note 7,” Baxter said, adding that “We continue our intensive efforts internally and with third party experts to understand what happened and to make sure that it does not happen again. He added that Samsung will be sharing its root cause report on the Galaxy Note 7 “very soon.”
Despite the setbacks, Baxter reminded the attendees that Samsung has not and will not stop innovating and then he kicked off the day's proceedings. It was good move by Samsung to get this out of the way so that the press can now focus on everything new that it's unveiling at CES 2017 instead of obsessing about why it didn't mention the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco at all.
Update: According to a senior official at Samsung, the firm concluded its investigation into the cause of the Galaxy Note 7 fires on December 12, and is preparing to announce the results on January 23. The firm is believed to disclose its fourth-quarter results the following day.
