Galaxy Note 7

The Galaxy Note 7 failed because its batteries caught fire, and so did the replacement phones Samsung sent out to fix it. Samsung stopped making it less than eight weeks after it went on sale.

What it was

The Galaxy Note 7 was Samsung's large-screen phone for 2016, with an S Pen stylus, an iris scanner and a 3,500 mAh battery.

Samsung Electronics unveiled it in New York on August 2, 2016.

It went on sale in US stores on August 19. "Simply put, the Galaxy Note7 is the best phone we've ever built," said Tim Baxter, president of Samsung Electronics America, that day.

What happened

The Galaxy Note 7 was on sale for two weeks before Samsung first stopped selling it.

On August 31, 2016, The Guardian reported that Samsung had delayed shipments in South Korea, amid unconfirmed local reports of batteries exploding while charging. A Samsung spokesperson told Reuters the delay was "due to additional tests being conducted for product quality."

On September 2, Samsung said it had found "a battery cell issue" after 35 reported cases worldwide, and stopped sales. DJ Koh, president of Samsung's Mobile Communications Business, announced at a press conference in Seoul that Samsung would replace all 2.5 million phones shipped so far, Bloomberg reported.

On September 15, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced Samsung's formal recall of about 1 million phones. Samsung had received 92 US reports of batteries overheating, including 26 of burns and 55 of property damage, "including fires in cars and a garage."

AT&T and T-Mobile expected replacement phones by September 21, The Verge reported.

On October 5, a Note 7 began "popping and smoking" on a Southwest Airlines plane at Louisville before takeoff, and the plane was evacuated, USA Today reported. It was apparently one of the replacements Samsung had deemed safe, the paper said.

On October 10, Samsung said it would ask "all carrier and retail partners globally to stop sales and exchanges of the Galaxy Note7." The Verge called it a worldwide recall, issued after at least five replacement phones caught fire in a week.

A day later Samsung said, "we have decided to halt sales and production of the Galaxy Note 7," The Verge reported.

On October 14, US regulators banned the phone from US airline flights from noon the next day, even switched off.

By January 2017 Samsung had recalled 3.06 million Note 7 phones and estimated the problems would cost it at least $5.3 billion through early 2017, the Associated Press reported.

The Note line survived. Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Note 8 on August 23, 2017, with a 3,300 mAh battery.

Why it failed

The Galaxy Note 7 failed because both batteries Samsung used in it could short-circuit and catch fire, its investigation found. Bloomberg traced the crisis to Samsung's rush to launch ahead of Apple's next iPhone.

What Samsung said

In September 2016, Samsung blamed one supplier. It said in a statement, quoted by Bloomberg, that "this issue is isolated to the battery cell from one supplier only," and that all replacement phones would have batteries from other suppliers.

Samsung announced its findings on January 23, 2017. Koh presented them in Seoul alongside executives from UL, Exponent and TUV Rheinland, which had run their own investigations.

Samsung said 700 staff on the investigation tested 200,000 phones and 30,000 additional batteries, Recode reported.

According to Samsung, a design flaw in the upper right corner of the first battery made the electrodes prone to bend, which in some cases led to a short circuit. The second battery, from a different supplier, had a welding defect from manufacturing, it said. Some of those were also missing insulation tape, The Verge reported.

Samsung tied the second battery's problems to its supplier's push to increase production quickly once the first was pulled, Recode wrote. "We believe if not for that manufacturing issue on the ramp [of battery B], the Note 7 would still be on the market," Baxter told Recode.

Samsung told Recode its design, while demanding on battery suppliers, was not the reason the batteries failed. It said it was "taking responsibility for our failure to ultimately identify and verify the issues," the AP reported.

None of the Samsung statements I read names launch timing as a cause. Samsung declined to tell Bloomberg whether it moved the launch up because of the iPhone, and said timing was based on "the proper completion of the development process and the readiness of the product for the market."

What reporting showed

Bloomberg reported in September 2016 that Samsung's top managers, including Koh, "decided to accelerate the launch" after hearing Apple's next iPhone wouldn't have "any eye-popping innovations," citing people familiar with the matter.

They "pushed suppliers to meet tighter deadlines, despite loads of new features," another person told Bloomberg. According to Bloomberg, Samsung's leaders approved a launch date 10 days earlier than the year before, for a phone with a 3,500 mAh battery against 3,000 mAh in the previous model.

Bloomberg also reported that Samsung's phone division blamed battery maker Samsung SDI, whose managers argued the problem could be in the phone design or insulation. Samsung said there was no ongoing debate. The CPSC's chairman said the battery was slightly too big for its compartment, according to Bloomberg.

After the January findings, Forrester analyst Frank Gillett said Samsung needed to find ways to keep commercial pressures, such as getting a phone out quickly, from pushing engineers into bad decisions, the AP reported. The same story said the Note 7 "was timed, in part, to beat Apple's iPhone 7 by weeks."

What later analysis found

In a December 2016 post, Anna-Katrina Shedletsky of Instrumental, which sells manufacturing inspection tools, described the company's teardown of a Note 7. The battery and adhesive in its two-month-old unit were 5.2 mm thick, "resting in a 5.2 mm deep pocket."

"There should have been a 0.5 mm ceiling," she wrote, room for a battery to swell as it ages. Her verdict was that "Samsung took a deliberate step towards danger."

That teardown came before Samsung's findings, which said nothing was wrong with the phone itself. In an October 2017 follow-up, she still called the root cause "a design flaw that did not leave enough thickness for the battery."

The stage it reached

The Galaxy Note 7 died in the introduction stage. Samsung pulled it before it could reach growth, so I count it as a failure, not a decline.

It's an odd fit, since my product life cycle guide describes that stage as the launch period, when sales are small. Bloomberg put Note 7 shipments at 2.5 million by September 2.

The lesson

I think the second round of fires is the part to study. A supplier's bad battery can happen to anyone. Shipping a replacement that also catches fire is a process failure.

I'd treat a recall replacement as a new launch. Find the root cause first, then test units from the production line itself, after it has sped up.

Before I'd fix a launch date, I'd budget the battery testing and the supplier's ramp into it.