The world's biggest smartphone maker Samsung blamed faulty batteries for the fires that led to last year's humiliating recall of its flagship Galaxy Note 7 device. Internal and independent investigations "concluded that batteries were found to be the cause of the Note 7 incidents", the South Korean company said in a statement.
The giant conglomerate was forced to discontinue the smartphone -- originally intended to compete with Apple's iPhone -- after a chaotic recall that saw replacement devices also catching fire. The debacle cost the company billions in lost profit and reputational damage. It deployed around 700 researchers and engineers on its investigation, testing more than 200,000 fully-assembled devices and more than 30,000 batteries, it said.
Samsung announced a recall of 2.5 million units of the oversized Galaxy Note 7 in September 2016 after several devices exploded or caught fire, with the company blaming batteries from a supplier, widely believed to be its sister firm Samsung SDI. When replacement phones -- with batteries from another firm -- also started to combust, the company eventually decided to kill off the Note 7 for good.
