If you only know Samsung from the phone in your hand, you are missing most of the story.
The same company behind the Galaxy is also in semiconductors, displays, batteries, construction and biotechnology. It has built the Burj Khalifa, supplied components to companies that compete with it and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, manufactured Moderna’s vaccine at scale.
And then there is Tesla.
In 2025, Tesla signed a semiconductor manufacturing agreement with Samsung worth approximately $16.5 billion, running through 2033. The irony is hard to miss: Samsung and Tesla operate in overlapping technology markets, yet one is paying the other to manufacture critical components.
That is what makes Samsung worth studying.
Its advantage is not simply that it operates in many industries. It is that Samsung has repeatedly found ways to turn what it already knows how to do into something another market needs.
Here are five things Samsung understands about business that many founders miss.
1. Don’t just sell the thing. Own the thing behind it.
A lot of companies want to be the brand customers see. Samsung has repeatedly gone after the infrastructure underneath the brand.
Take smartphones. Samsung does not only make phones. Through Samsung Display, it manufactures OLED panels used across the smartphone industry. Its OLED panels have been used across hundreds of smartphone models from brands including Samsung, Vivo, OPPO and Xiaomi, meaning the company can participate in a market even when the phone carrying the screen is not a Samsung phone.
This is a different way of thinking about a business.
Instead of asking only, “What product can we sell?” Samsung often asks, “What important part of this industry can we become indispensable at?”
That is a much harder position for competitors to take away.
2. You don’t have to win the same way in every industry.
Fly into Dubai and the Burj Khalifa will find you before you find it, 828 metres of glass and steel standing over the desert. There is no Samsung logo blinking from the top. Yet Samsung C&T’s Engineering & Construction Group was the primary contractor behind it. Building at that height required specialised construction techniques, including high-pressure concrete pumping. Years later, the same division built Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, now the second-tallest building in the world.
Samsung did not enter construction and try to make construction work like consumer electronics. It had to learn the industry, solve its particular problems and compete according to its own rules.
That is useful for founders because entering a new market does not mean your old playbook automatically comes with you.
Your existing strength can give you an advantage, but you still have to learn the new game.
3. Your competitor can become your customer.
Samsung and Apple have spent years fighting for the same smartphone customers.
But business is rarely that simple.
Samsung Display has supplied OLED technology for smartphones made by different brands, while Samsung’s semiconductor business operates as a contract manufacturer for other companies.
And Tesla makes the point even more clearly. In 2025, it became the customer in Samsung’s $16.5 billion semiconductor manufacturing agreement.
This is one of the most useful things founders can learn from Samsung: you do not have to dislike a competitor to do business with them.
If another company is better at reaching customers but you are better at manufacturing, technology, logistics or infrastructure, there may be a business between you.
The question should not always be, “How do I beat them?” Sometimes it should be, “What can I provide that they need, even if we compete elsewhere?”
That mindset can open doors that a purely competitive approach would leave closed.
4. Don’t enter a new market just because it is growing. Enter where your advantage travels.
Samsung’s businesses can look almost unrelated from the outside.
Phones. Batteries. Construction. Biotechnology.
But look closer and there is a common thread: Samsung repeatedly carries existing expertise into places where that expertise has value.
Samsung SDI, for example, has supplied batteries to automakers for years, including BMW. Its automotive battery business grew out of expertise in rechargeable battery technology rather than simply because electric vehicles became fashionable.
That is a much healthier way to think about diversification.
A founder does not need to ask, “What hot industry should we enter next?”
A better question is, “What do we already know how to do well that another market is willing to pay for?”
The opportunity is often hiding in the distance between what you already do well and what another market desperately needs.
5. You don’t need to solve the whole problem to build a valuable business.
In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Samsung Biologics signed an agreement with Moderna to provide large-scale fill-finish manufacturing for Moderna’s vaccine at its facility in South Korea. The deal was expected to support hundreds of millions of doses for markets outside the United States.
Samsung did not invent the vaccine, It did not become Moderna. It solved one important part of the problem: manufacturing and preparing the vaccine at scale. Within five months of signing the agreement, the first batch of the Moderna vaccine manufactured by Samsung Biologics was released for domestic supply.
That is a useful way for founders to look at opportunity.
When you see a huge problem, you may feel you need a huge solution. You don’t.
Find the part of the problem that matches what you already know how to do. Then become exceptionally useful at that part.
You don’t have to climb the whole mountain. Sometimes, there is a valuable business in owning one difficult section of the climb.
The lesson Samsung leaves behind
Samsung’s story is not really about diversification.It is about leverage.
The company keeps taking capabilities it has spent years developing and finding new places where those capabilities can create value.
That is why the same company can be behind a smartphone display, a Tesla semiconductor contract, a BMW battery relationship, the Burj Khalifa and part of the global COVID-19 vaccine supply chain.
For founders, the lesson is not to become Samsung.
It is to look at your own business differently.
What have you become unusually good at? Who else needs it? And what other problems could that capability solve?
Sometimes, the next business is not a completely new idea. It is hiding inside something you already know how to do well.
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