Samsung is reportedly sniffing around HP’s for-sale computer division.
I can understand Samsung wanting to become the World’s Largest Computer Maker™, but I’m not sure how much sense it makes. HP is getting out of making computers, because tablets and mobile have just murdered their razor-thin margins. There just aren’t enough profits to justify HP staying in the business, after waving the white flag in the mobile space.
Samsung is enjoying success in mobile. They make some very nice Android phones, and their tablet is the best (surviving) iPad competitor. The latter isn’t saying much — but the tablet market is still quite young.
So why would Samsung want to take resources (cash, engineering talent, etc) away from mobile and devote it to a low-margin, dead-end mass market? Of course, the Google/Motorola deal still doesn’t make much sense to me, so maybe I’m too stodgy on M&A deals. What do you think?
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