I'll be straight with you.
When the Samsung Unpacked 2026 notification hit my feed, my first instinct was to scroll past it. Because you know what a phone launch event is these days? Same circus, different year. Cold lighting. Perfectly tailored executive on stage. Pretty slides. Words like "revolutionary," "innovative," and "immersive experience" — repeated until they've been drained of whatever meaning they might have once had.
It's the Super Bowl of empty marketing.
But then I stopped and thought: hold on. Samsung isn't just any company. It's one of the few corporations on the planet with real skin in the game — it makes the chips, makes the screens, makes the memory, assembles the device, sells the device. While Apple outsources everything to Foxconn and pretends that's "California design," Samsung has factory floors, heavy engineering, and the scars of a company that once lost billions when a Galaxy Note 7 literally exploded in its customers' hands.
When you screw up that badly and still survive, you've learned something.
The market isn't waiting for you, Samsung
The global smartphone sector is in a quiet slump. Growth has stalled. The average consumer used to upgrade every 18 months — now they wait three, four years. Why? Because the difference between a 2022 flagship and a 2025 flagship is marginal. Incremental. Boring.
That's not a blogger's opinion. That's what IDC shipment data shows cycle after cycle.
Apple read the room and shifted the game to services — App Store, iCloud, Apple TV+, Apple Pay. The Cupertino machine's services revenue now outpaces hardware in margin. It's the razor-and-blades model in its most sophisticated form. You sell the hardware almost as bait and collect on the recurring revenue.
Samsung? Still trying to convince you that the 200-megapixel camera and the phone that folds in half are the future.
Maybe they are. But the financial market priced in that doubt a long time ago.
AI as a lifeline or as a smoke screen?
Unpacked 2026 came loaded with artificial intelligence promises. Galaxy AI, large language model integration, an assistant that "understands the context" of your life.
Where have I heard that before?
Everyone is wrapping AI around their products right now. It's the new blockchain. It's the new metaverse. It's the new NFT. Not that the technology is useless — far from it. But when everybody uses the same word as a marketing crutch, it's time to turn on your BS detector.
The right question isn't "does Samsung's phone have AI?" The right question is: does that AI solve a real problem the consumer has — one they couldn't solve before?
If the answer is yes, that's a business. If the answer is "it looks great in a PowerPoint deck," that's a circus.
For now, it looks a lot more like the second one.
What does any of this have to do with investing?
Everything, my friend.
Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) is one of the largest holdings in emerging market funds around the world. When the company launches a new product, analysts from Seoul to São Paulo rewrite their revenue projections, revise multiples, adjust price targets.
And here's the point Taleb would make with a smile: the analyst writing that report doesn't have a single dollar of their own money in the position. They collect a fixed salary, a guaranteed bonus, and sleep just fine regardless of whether you bought Samsung at ₩80,000 based on their recommendation.
Skin in the game, people. Always.
If you're looking at Samsung as an investment thesis — whether directly through ADRs or through emerging market ETFs — the S26 launch is a data point, not the data point. What actually matters is the semiconductor division, the recovery cycle for DRAM and NAND memory, and the US-China tech cold war that could just as easily benefit or obliterate the Korean company's supply chain.
The pretty phone? That's the window display.
The chip inside it — and inside half the world's AI servers — that's the business.
So before you get swept up in the Galaxy S26's camera or the new Buds 4 promising "revolutionary" noise cancellation (banned word in my vocabulary), ask yourself one thing:
Are you buying the product, or are you buying the company?
Those are completely different decisions. And confusing the two is the most expensive mistake retail investors make — repeatedly, happily, generation after generation.
The circus will go on. The question is whether you're in the audience or selling popcorn.
