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Goodbye, Mr Dong: Samsung Galaxy S5 boss disappears through trapdoor

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Samsung has parted ways with Chang Dong-hoon, the head of its mobile design team.

The doomed exec offered to step down last week and will be replaced by Lee Min-hyouk, Reuters reports. The move follows criticism that the company's flagship Galaxy S5 is not sufficiently innovative to stir the mobile market.

Less-than-stellar S5 sales could worry Samsung because Samsung Electronics is the standout contributor of profit and revenue to the group, which comprises 50-plus companies. Some are listed, others are not.

One of those subsidiaries, the IT services arm Samsung SDS, today signalled it will conduct an initial public offering in South Korea.

Samsung SDS already operates in its home nation, China, India, the Americas and has its EMEA headquarters in the UK. In 2013, those operations employed around 18,000 people and generated $US6.6bn in revenue, making it a significant global services entity.

The company offers a wide range of services, spanning business process outsourcing, IT outsourcing, services for telcos and data centre operators and assistance to manufacturers.

The Samsung Group's structure means spinning out Samsung SDS is not out of the ordinary. A float also supports the theory offered by South Korean news service Yonhap reports that the float is “in line with its efforts to expand its business to the overseas market.”

A few hundred million – or billion – dollars from investors to kick along those expansion plans won't go astray.

The float could also help Samsung Electronics, which signalled in its Q1 results that it wants to “strengthen its B2B business footprint through Knox”.

Knox is Samsung Electronics' mobile device management and on-phone security service for Android devices. Samsung SDS already professes enterprise mobility expertise and Knox is just the kind of product that will benefit from a good system integrator talking it up and stringing it together. With the services company already boasting business to business IT engagements, letting Samsung SDS take Knox to the global market looks a natural fit. ®

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