Singapore/Seoul, Dec 23

Efforts to revive its once stellar smartphone fortunes may be doomed if Samsung Electronics cannot overcome its dominant engineering culture, according to serving and former executives and those who have dealt with the company.

This culture, they say, has stymied many previous efforts to develop software and service platforms to support the smartphone business. In the past year several such services have closed down, at least one of them within a year of being launched.

“There’s a lot of distrust of top executives who can actually implement stuff that is more of a software and services offering,” said one person familiar with company’s inner workings. “It’s still ‘we know how to sell boxes, we sell boxes’.”

Growth in handset sales is slowing as the smartphone market matures, and without its own distinctive software, content and services, Samsung has little to differentiate itself from other Android phone makers selling similar devices at lower prices.

Samsung points to the launch of its mobile payments service, Samsung Pay, and its home control ‘internet of things’ platform, SmartThings, as among the signs it has learned from its past. But this may not be enough.

Interviews with former and serving employees paint a picture of confusion and overlap between competing divisions, where the short-term interests of promoting hardware trump long-term efforts to build platforms that would add value for customers and increase their loyalty to the brand.

One said he only learned from someone outside the company that the hands-free app his team was updating for the upcoming Galaxy S4 launch had competition — from inside Samsung. As a result, critics say, initiatives involving software or services languish and often fail.