"Go big or go home." It's a phrase often used to encourage or motivate but it could also effectively describe Samsung's business philosophy. The company's smartphone and tablet strategy is to flood the market with all sorts of devices and see what sticks (they've put out roughly 46 smartphones and 27 tablets this year alone) including some absolutely massive handsets like the aptly named Galaxy Mega.
And after evaluating Samsung's 10-K SEC filing, we now know their employee count is just as big as their marketing budget.
Ars Technica recently compared Samsung's filing with those of some of its biggest rivals - Apple, Google, Microsoft and Sony - and discovered its employee head count dwarfs the competition.
According to the report, Samsung employs 275,133 people while the next largest company on the list (in terms of head count) is Sony's electronics arm at 105,000 staffers. Microsoft ranked third with 99,000 employees, Apple finished fourth with 80,300 team members (more than half of which is from their retail stores) and Google was the leanest of all with just 47,756 individuals on the payroll.
Digging deeper, Ars found that Samsung had a whopping 40,506 software engineers as of 2013 which represents a 45 percent increase since 2011. Google, meanwhile, only employs 18,593 software makers which is telling when you consider how easy it is to name Google software versus Samsung software.
Considering every other company under the sun is seemingly going through a restructuring effort or otherwise slashing its workforce, Samsung seems content to do just the opposite. It's paid off for them thus far but will the Korean tech giant be able to sustain its level of employment amid sliding share values?