Steve Jobs' Resignation: The Opening Samsung Was Looking For? [Video]

Apple’s Steve Jobs resigned as the company’s CEO on Wednesday and passed the reins to his right-hand man, Tim Cook. Jobs, one of the co-founders along with Steve Woznaik and Ronald Wayne, himself became the Chairman of the company. The resignation came at a very crucial time in the battle for smartphone supremacy and patent wars.

Samsung’s shares already rose sharply by 3.4 percent, after rising as much as 4.2 percent earlier and beating a 1.9 percent rise in the wider market, on Thursday. The analysts said that the company also received a boost from a Dutch Patent Ruling and Jobs’ decision to step down as Apple’s CEO.

Even before Steve Jobs' (resignation), Samsung was getting more and more optimistic that they can actually take on Apple in the smartphone arena, Mark Newman, a former director of strategy at Samsung, told Reuters. “The game is really now Samsung's to lose ... They are picking up market share because of the change in dynamics in the smartphone industry.”

Samsung has recently posed a serious threat in the form of Samsung Galaxy S2 for Apple. The Galaxy S2, due in North America, is currently the best smartphone on the planet. Apple’s iPhone 5 is expected to arrive in October according to sources. Critics have already predicted that a fierce smartphone battle is on the cards with iPhone 5’s arrival and its attempt to take on Galaxy S2’s popularity.

Apple and Samsung are currently fighting for the top spot in the smartphone market, having already overtaken the market leader for the last decade, Nokia, in the second quarter. Samsung's sales rose more than 500 percent in the second quarter, easily beating Apple's 142 percent growth, though Apple sold about 1 million more units. Nokia sales, however, fell 30 percent, according to a Reuters report.

Both the companies have, previously, filed lawsuits against each other in Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, and South Korea. Samsung said, in legal filings, that Apple's iPad is modeled in part on electronic equipment depicted in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: Space Odyssey, and doesn’t qualify as an original design.

Jobs' resignation has a positive impact on market sentiment toward Samsung...Investors were concerned about whether Samsung will be able to continue to fare well in the smartphone market as Apple is growing market share, Jeon Nam-joong, a fund manager at Consus Asset Management, told Reuters. But Job's resignation will offer opportunities to Samsung for a longer term, although it will not have an immediate impact.

He added that Job’s resignation will offer new opportunities for Samsung to expand its smartphone market share at a time when Nokia is struggling. Samsung, however, still lags behind in tablet sales as Apple can boast 14 million iPad sales in the first half, compared to Samsung’s 7.5 million tablet products for all of 2011, Reuters reported.

Apple was established on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, to sell the Apple I personal computer kit. It was hand-built by Wozniak and first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club. As of September 2010, Apple had 46,600 full-time employees and had worldwide annual sales of $65.23 billion.

Apple was named the most admired company by the Fortune Magazine in the United States in 2008, 2009 and 2010.