After the first reports of Samsung Galaxy Note7 smartphones catching fire came in, company executives decided, based on lab reports that showed a bulge in batteries supplied by Samsung SDI, that it was the cause and ordered a recall.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, X-ray and CT scans of devices with batteries from another supplier did not show the protrusion.
Despite there being no explanation for the bulges, the newly appointed Samsung mobile head D.J. Koh decided that this was sufficient knowledge to recall all the 2.5 million Note7s sold. Samsung's third-generation heir apparent, Lee Jae-yong backed the move.
And this decision, based on incomplete evidence, is now coming back to haunt the company, the Journal says.
{loadposition sam08}The fact that the initial diagnosis was incorrect became evident when replacement devices, all of which had batteries from the other supplier, also started to explode.
When regulators started to raise fresh questions, the two Samsung officials, Lee and Koh, decided to kill the phone once and for all.
The US Consumer Product Safety Commission, which oversees product recalls in the country, Samsung's biggest smartphone market, is likely to conduct a probe to see whether it was notified soon enough by Samsung of the dangers posed by the Note7.
This has to be the scariest #Halloween costume this year! #Note7 pic.twitter.com/FZlxvCmAt0
— PresCEO (@BJPresCEO) 19 October 2016
Samsung's decision to issue its own recall, without co-ordinating this move with the CPSC, could have prevented the regulatory agency from finding out more about the root cause of the problem.
No conclusive answer has yet been provided by Samsung as to what caused the Note7 devices to combust.
The Journal report said experts outside the company had speculated that there could be any one of a number of things that caused the problem: from software that manages battery interaction with other components to the circuit design to the battery case being too small to house battery of the capacity that was in the Note7.
Samsung engineers are now working on finding out the cause of the overheating, delaying by a fortnight development of the Galaxy S8 device.
The fiasco has cost Samsung US$8 billion in market value and the company has said the whole affair could cost anything from US$5 billion, including lost sales.