Before we get into what concerns the phones themselves, I am interested both in Anders Elmby’s actual mission and in other product groups, such as the watches and Galaxy Ring.
In Swedish, we call Anders Elmby’s role at Samsung the Nordic mobile manager, but formally he has recently been promoted from Director MX to Vice President MX, where MX is short for Mobile Experience and is simply Samsung’s mobile division, really everything called Galaxy. TVs and, for example, household appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators are separate and do not belong there.
As Nordic mobile manager at Samsung, Anders Elmby has country managers for each country and he sees his most important role as giving each team the best possible conditions and being a bridge to the head office in South Korea, sometimes via the European office in England. The Nordenkontoret is primarily a sales and marketing office, so the actual product development is mainly done at the head office, but the Nordenkontoret has great power to make local decisions about the range, customers and how they talk about the products. Anders Elmby highlights several unique things in the Nordic market, but also how the Nordic countries clearly differ and are not a homogeneous group. For phones, for example, Sweden and Norway are more premium-focused, while in Finland it is more value for money that hits the mark.
Before we get into what concerns the phones themselves, I am interested both in Anders Elmby’s actual mission and in other product groups, such as the watches and Galaxy Ring.
In Swedish, we call Anders Elmby’s role at Samsung the Nordic mobile manager, but formally he has recently been promoted from Director MX to Vice President MX, where MX is short for Mobile Experience and is simply Samsung’s mobile division, really everything called Galaxy. TVs and, for example, household appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators are separate and do not belong there.
As Nordic mobile manager at Samsung, Anders Elmby has country managers for each country and he sees his most important role as giving each team the best possible conditions and being a bridge to the head office in South Korea, sometimes via the European office in England. The Nordenkontoret is primarily a sales and marketing office, so the actual product development is mainly done at the head office, but the Nordenkontoret has great power to make local decisions about the range, customers and how they talk about the products. Anders Elmby highlights several unique things in the Nordic market, but also how the Nordic countries clearly differ and are not a homogeneous group. For phones, for example, Sweden and Norway are more premium-focused, while in Finland it is more value for money that hits the mark.
Health trend and the right product for the right person
Given that Samsung itself is talking about something of a health trend today, we start by talking about the company’s Galaxy Watch and Galaxy Ring. Today it’s about a year and a half since Samsung released its ring and I notice that just like that sits on one of the fingers on Anders Elmby’s one hand.
– We have a very big investment in health and above all when connected to AI, which is then connected both to the Galaxy ring and to the watches in the Galaxy Watch series.
Anders Elmby says that the ring that was released in Sweden ahead of the Christmas trade in 2024 has lived up to the expectations they had and fulfills a clear function for users. Perhaps above all for those who choose not to have a smartwatch and use the ring instead, but also for those who use both and see them as complementary.
As for the watches, I see a trend where more watches get increasingly better battery life?
– We have chosen to focus on health with our watches and we see that we have competitors who have chosen other directions. Then I also notice that the price difference between watches that do not have mobile connectivity and those that do is decreasing. We have many watches with mobile connection and notice that we have very high customer satisfaction with our watches. The battery life they have is not perceived as a problem. All this together has also made smart watches a much more relevant product for operators to sell today than just a few years ago, says Anders Elmby.
For some products, such as the watches with Wear OS, you have a close collaboration with Google, while in other areas, for example Smarttag, you choose to act yourself, how do you make those choices?
– It is always the customer experience that decides. With the watches, the collaboration with Google provides broad compatibility with apps, but for example our televisions run their own system.
Biggest change within Samsung
This, Anders Elmby tells us, is the big change that has taken place within Samsung in recent years. He thinks the company has always been at the forefront of innovation, but that historically it has sometimes been innovation for the sake of it.
– In recent years, the discussions are much more about what the innovation adds to the customer experience. The Privacy Display in the S26 Ultra, for example, is great for the user.
How is Samsung in terms of support for satellite connection in mobile phones?
– We have a couple of collaborations, mainly in the USA, but we have not implemented satellite support in the same way as one of our competitors (read Apple, editor’s note) has done, because the user experience is not good enough. We are always open to new technology and to new collaborations, but it must be done on the customer’s terms and if it adds a lot of value then we will certainly be there with different types of support for satellite.
Exynos vs Snapdragon competition that challenges
With regard to Samsung’s flagship phones, there has been discussion at times about the system chip, where Qualcomm’s Snapdragon has been used but also Samsung’s own Exynos. This year with the S26 series, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy ended up in the S26 Ultra, while the S26 and S26 Plus have Samsung’s 2-nanometer chip Exynos 2600 in the Ultra. Anders Elmby says that here, too, the user experience comes first and there is no intrinsic value in choosing your own components, on the contrary, there can be value in pushing and challenging your own organization with external suppliers such as Qualcomm with Snapdragon.
– I don’t know if you should interpret our choice of Snapdragon in Ultra as the best performer. In our early performance measurements, both chips performed very evenly.
These very components are important for AI, and there you have talked a lot about the desire to democratize AI, that it must not become a luxury so that certain users are excluded. How does it rhyme with Galaxy AI in the top models but the more limited Awesome Intelligence in the Galaxy A series?
– It is absolutely stated from our side to take as many good ai functions as possible as far down the price ladder as possible and we do that. But we don’t do it at the expense of the customer experience, and advanced AI requires a lot of computing power.
Anders Elmby also tells us that the A series of phones has traditionally often served as an entry model for new customers and among those who today buy a phone in the S series are many who had a Samsung phone before and about 20 percent of them come from a specific Galaxy A series model.
The AI strategy is fixed
With the S26 series you introduced several AI agents and as a user you can use Gemini, Bixby and Perplexity. How is the user supposed to know which one to use for what?
– The idea and the ultimate goal is that you as a user should not have to think about it at all. Going forward, it is both about an educational effort and about technical development to get there, and also about how deep cooperation can be had with third-party providers of AI services. Because we are very open, but at the same time we never compromise with users’ privacy or security.
Anders Elmby continues to talk specifically about Galaxy AI and says that the vision and goal have been and are the same since Galaxy AI was released in conjunction with the launch of the Galaxy S24. Galaxy AI, he says, is a platform for different kinds of agentic ai services and integration against those services.
– We clearly see that AI is appreciated. With the S25 Ultra, 53 percent used AI during the first four weeks with the product, today the corresponding figure for the S26 Ultra is 90 percent.