[shepard]

Indeed, you are bringing very interesting points:

- vertical integration (and tighter control over quality / schedules) for technology companies, and

- size/scale as an advantage in Marketplace.

We have seeing both of these in play, not just with Samsung: Apple is designing their own CPUs, and you can argue they leverage their size to help iTunes and Apple Pay businesses.

Still, there are counterexamples: NVIDIA (and many other successful companies) are fabless, and AMD divested their fabs (by splitting into AMD and Global Foundries).

What HP seem to be spinning off is their consulting arm and the enterprise hardware businesses, where vertical integration/size doesn't matter that much.

[shmerl]

It can have its downsides. For example Nvidia didn't manage to push 16nm chips into their latest Maxwell cards because plants that they use for manufacturing were already booked ahead. Intel on the other hand use their own plants and can decide things more flexibly.

[sjg007]

If anything at scale you should own the whole chain.

[giovannibajo1]

Not sure the counter example of Apple stands; they have a specific goal: be in full control of the whole technological stack for their products. They don't design processors and sell them like Qualcomm; they just do whatever is necessary for their product line.

A conglomerate like HP and Samsung often has little to no cross-pollination between divisions. Obviously the semiconductor part of Samsung can benefit the whole business, but the intersection between TV and dishwasher is probably zero, even at marketing level (they have totally different marketing and sales departments).