Samsung is a pretty strange company overall, perhaps more comparable to one of the sprawling late-19th-century industrial conglomerates than anything in the current U.S. business landscape. It not only has a huge array of businesses it officially owns (from computers to shipbuilding), but is part of an unofficial, even larger conglomerate, the "Samsung family group", consisting of the other companies the family controls.

It's also been pretty deeply intertwined with the Korean government at various times, along with the other two big family groups (LG and Hyundai), who it sort-of competes with and sort-of has a cozy relationship with. All that actually makes it somewhat remarkable that it's coming up with interesting tech; that kind of company is not usually nimble.