Samsung didn’t promote from within to lead RX’s strategy — it hired Executive Vice President Lee Dongkun, who previously directed robotics strategy at Hyundai Motor Group, the parent of Boston Dynamics, and who oversaw development of the electric Atlas humanoid and Spot quadruped during Hyundai’s push to commercialize both. That hire, paired with Samsung’s Rainbow Robotics subsidiary already commercializing the RBY1 wheeled dual-arm platform and developing HUBO bipedal prototypes, signals a company assembling deployment expertise, not just research capability. See our coverage of Unitree’s TIME cover hiding a 9% industrial deployment problem for how deployment expertise, not funding or hype, is the scarce resource across this entire sector right now.
Samsung’s in-house robots strategy also extends to components most competitors buy from third parties: the company is developing its own actuators using motor technologies adapted from home appliances, an unusual but financially logical move for a company that already runs enormous consumer-electronics manufacturing lines. Owning that layer reduces both cost and dependency on the same small set of actuator suppliers every other humanoid maker competes for.
⚠ Fiction — composite scenario, not a real event: A robotics analyst covers Samsung’s RX division purely as a Tesla and Unitree competitor, publishing a forecast comparing unit shipment targets. Two years later, Samsung has shipped fewer finished humanoids than expected — but its foundry chip revenue from robotics customers across five different manufacturers has quietly become a bigger business line than the humanoid unit itself, exactly the outcome the shipment-focused forecast never modeled.
