Samsung has been attacked on Chinese state television as the tech giant revealed plans to prevent third-party accessories working with its smartphones in the future.
Korea IT News reports the electronics giant recently distributed a mandatory new authenticity recognition chip to be installed in all official peripherals.
While the company cites product reliability as the reason for the change, the report notes the real reason is to leverage the company’s strong position in the smartphone market into the accessories market.
The increased focused on accessories comes amidst fears the company could be approaching saturation point in the marketplace.
Meanwhile, Korean newspaper the Chosun Ilbo reports CCTV dedicated 30 minutes to a program accusing Samsung of producing faulty and low-quality mobile phones and memory cards.
The program features one Galaxy S owner who complained his phone frequently stopped working, along with mobile phone technicians who accuse the company of making devices that are prone to failure.
Samsung is not the first foreign-owned tech giant to gain negative attention in the Chinese media.
In March, reports surfaced of a white paper within China white paper praising Chinese companies including Baidu, Alibaba and Huawei for creating their own mobile operating systems, while attacking the control Google has over the Android platform.
“Our country’s mobile operating system research and development is too dependent on Android,” the paper states
“While the Android system is open source, the core technology and technology roadmap is strictly controlled by Google.”
The latest attack on Samsung also comes a month after an article in the China Daily attacked Apple.
“Apple’s iPhone 5c was probably priced too high and the iPhone 5s does not offer Chinese potential buyers anything significantly new,” the article stated.
“Such neglect also explains Apple’s lowly seventh place in the Chinese market where strong domestic competitors have so easily gained share.”
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
