Samsung's head of MX sales Ireland Paul Toland. Image: Samsung
Samsung’s head of MX Sales Ireland Paul Toland discusses the challenges the smartphone market faced last year, the recent success of the Galaxy S24 and how AI is being viewed as a ‘gamechanger’ for the sector.
Samsung has had an interesting couple of years, facing profit challenges in 2023 before making a comeback this year.
The company was forced to cut its global chip production ahead of a profit plunge last year. Meanwhile, it suffered from the challenges facing the global smartphone market and competition from companies like Apple.
But it also focused on new technology such as generative AI, which was a key feature of its latest flagship smartphone model, the Galaxy S24. This helped the company regain a lead in the smartphone market and the demand for AI helped its profits rise back up this year.
To learn more about the company and its affairs in Ireland, SiliconRepublic.com spoke to Paul Toland, the head of MX sales in Ireland. MX – or mobile experience – relates to all of the company’s mobile technology products.
“I wouldn’t call myself a veteran of the industry, but I’m certainly in the tech industry in some shape or form for the last … coming up on 25 years,” Toland said.
Toland first joined Samsung in 2008 as a channel manager and has served in multiple roles prior to his MX sales position. “I’m tasked with ensuring that we deliver on our revenue ambitions for the Irish business and our strategic growth objectives,” he said.
Toland leads a team of six senior sales staff who each handle their own managed accounts. He believes it’s important to give his team “the autonomy to own their areas of business”.
“I also encourage them to think [for] themselves before perhaps escalating issues, whilst also ensuring that I’m available to support and that they are getting the required level of support from myself and if required, from our subsidiary leadership team,” Toland said. “So, it’s really about letting them operate independently but ensuring that they’re comfortable and confident that they have the support of the leadership team.
“Also, we operate a hybrid working policy here at Samsung so they have good flexibility in the working week to ensure to get that good and right work-life balance. And last but not least, on a regular basis, we of course recognise and reward our top achievers which is of course hugely important.”
Challenges in the mobile market
Toland said there are various challenges facing companies in the smartphone landscape, but said one particular challenge is “the competitive nature of the markets that we trade in”.
“It’s an extremely competitive landscape and more than ever before, differentiation is hugely important,” Toland said. “So, certainly from Samsung’s perspective, our focus is on bringing innovation and bringing innovative products to our consumers, into the market, and also very important in our new experiences, in order ultimately to stay ahead of our competitors.”
Toland believes some of the biggest innovations the company made recently to stay ahead were its focus in the foldable smartphone market and its efforts to bring generative AI to its smartphones.
But these developments were made while the global smartphone market faced a slump. By April 2023, reports suggested the global market was in a continuous period of declining quarters in terms of sales. A report by IDC that month claimed Samsung had retained the top spot but suffered a sales drop of roughly 19pc that quarter, while Apple was closing the gap between the two companies. Apple also appeared to have a much stronger dominance in the premium smartphone market compared to Samsung.
“2023 was a challenging year in the mobile tech space in Ireland and beyond; however, Samsung continues to invest in our people, our brand and, very importantly, our partners,” Toland said. “We massively understand the importance of strong partner relationships and, of course, have a very deep commitment to the average consumer.
“So, we just focused on what we do best, which is continuing to bring new innovative products to the market.”
The shift to AI
Toland described AI as “clearly the biggest opportunity”, noting that while it’s a “huge buzzword” across the industry, the mobile tech space sees it as a “real gamechanger”.
“I suppose we see – we call them intelligent devices – now being sort of the next generation of mobile technology, advancing on from what was the feature phone to the smartphone to now the intelligent phone,” Toland said. “And we see just a huge opportunity in our sector for future growth.
“However, obviously, AI is it’s quite a broad term. So it needs to provide real customer benefits.”
Samsung definitely highlighted generative AI as the key selling point of the Galaxy S24 range when it was revealed earlier this year. Toland claims his division has had a strong start to the year thanks to this product, describing it as the company’s “best ever flagship preorder”.
But Toland also claims to have witnessed changes in the market over the past few years in particular, as customers shift to more expensive smartphones.
“More recently, sort of over the last two to three years, we’ve seen a huge shift in the smartphone market towards what we call ‘premiumisation’, which is effectively the premium category of the smartphone side of the market is just continuing to increase,” Toland said.
“So, we see that in terms of premium segment in Ireland, it now accounts for approximately 45pc of all smartphones sold in the country, which is a significant uplift to if you think back maybe to 2021, where it was in around the low-to-mid 30s.”
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