Samsung Revamps Board: Appoints Tim Baxter As Corporate President

Samsung Electronics on Thursday announced major appointments to its board, including appointing a new corporate president. Tim Baxter, who is head of the company’s North America division, will now serve as corporate president of Samsung Electronics North America. He will remain CEO of the division.

Kwon Oh-Hyun will serve as the chairman of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, which works on its semiconductor business. Inyup Kang will serve as the president of the company’s large-scale integration (LSI) division, which works on core components of smartphones. DJ Koh is president of the company’s mobile business, and Roh Hee-Chan will serve as president and chief financial officer at Samsung Display. Hwang Deuk-Kyu will serve as president and head of Samsung China. The full list of appointments can be found on the company’s website.

The appointments will fill a vacuum of leadership in the company following the indictment of its South Korean president and heir to chairman Lee Kun-Hee. Lee Jae-Yong’s arrest in a corruption case in January and CEO Kwon Oh-Hyuh’s resignation in November, in which he stated that the company was facing an unprecedented crisis, raised further questions about the electronic giant's future.

“As we are confronted with unprecedented crisis inside out, I believe that time has now come for the company start anew, with a new spirit and young leadership to better respond to challenges arising from the rapidly changing IT industry,” Kwon said in his resignation letter.

The board rejig seems to be a response to the Kwon resignation as it does put younger leaders in charge — all the appointments are promotions from within the company.

The company was facing a series of debacles around the same time last year, following the Galaxy Note 7 crisis, which took place when the device started exploding due to its battery overheating.

The Note 7 fiasco caused the company a loss of $17 billion in the third quarter of 2016. But the company recovered thereafter and announced record profits in the next quarter. The company has been on a roll since and has generated record profits all three quarters of 2017. The major credit for this goes to the company’s diversification — it has put more focus on its semiconductor and display business.

The company set up a new plant in China to make displays for Apple’s 2017 flagship — the iPhone X and with chipmaker Qualcomm, also developed the world’s first commercial 10nm processor — the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835. The processor has been adopted by most leading flagships, including the Google Pixel 2 and OnePlus 5, boosting Samsung’s profit in consecutive quarters.

Samsung has also moved on from the Note 7 and launched the Galaxy S8 in April and the Galaxy Note 8 in August. Both devices have had a successful run. The company has sold more than two million Galaxy S8 handsets globally and even though the numbers for the Note 8 are not yet available, according to the South Korean publication the Investor, the company expects to sell 12 million handsets in the October-December quarter.

The new announcement follows the company’s announcement of three new CEOs on Tuesday. Kim Ki-Nam now heads the components business, HS Kim heads consumer electronics and DJ Koh heads the mobile business. The former leaders BK Yoon and JK Shin have resigned from their posts, making this the biggest board rejig in the company’s history.