Employee headcount, Samsung has more than Google, Apple and Microsoft combined

At 275,000 employees, Samsung (just Samsung
Electronics) is the size of five Googles! This explains
Samsung's machine-gun-style device output; the
company has released around 46 smartphones and 27
tablets just in 2014.
If we wanted to, we could cut these numbers down
some more. Google is going to shed 3,894 employees
once it finally gets rid of Motorola. Over half of Apple's
headcount—42,800 employees—is from the retail division,
putting the non-retail part of the company at only
37,500 employees. The "Sony" on this chart only means
"Sony Electronics," the part of the company that is most
comparable to Samsung Electronics. Sony Group has a
massive media arm consisting of Sony Pictures
Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, and Sony
Financial Services.
Samsung Electronics and Sony Electronics are pretty
comparable in terms of product range. They both make
at least one of everything you would find in a Best Buy
(though Samsung has no game console) along with
big component divisions, and Samsung still dwarfs
Sony with a two-and-a-half times bigger employee
count.
What is Samsung doing with all those people? Well, for
starters, the company has a shocking number of
software engineers: 40,506 as of 2013. That's almost an
entire Google's-worth of people making software.
Actually, consider that Google's employee breakdown
only lists 18,593 people in "research and
development" (read: making software), and it seems
Samsung has twice as many software engineers as
Google. This army of software engineers is a fairly recent
development for Samsung. The software headcount has
grown 45 percent since 2011.
Enlarge / Samsung has lots and lots of software
engineers.
Everyone can name notable pieces of Google software,
but Samsung's "2x Google" software engineer headcount
hasn't created the same level of impact. There is, of
course, Touchwiz and Samsung's range of
redundant Android ecosystem apps . The company has to
port Android and Touchwiz to every new handset it
makes, and when you release 70-ish devices every year
and have to support everything for around two years,
that's a very big project.
Samsung Electronics also includes the display and SoC
portions of Samsung, so there is a lot of firmware and
driver writing going on. All of those TVs, cameras, and
other small electronics also need some kind of software,
and the company is exploring writing its own OS with
Tizen .
As for the non-software side, production makes up the
bulk of Samsung jobs, with 159,488 involved in mass
production efforts. It should also be no surprise that the
majority of jobs are in Korea (33.5%), followed by China
(21%), and Southeast Asia (20%). Only 3.9% of
Samsung's jobs are located in North America.
While Samsung Electronics is a huge company, it's part
of an even bigger conglomerate called "Samsung Group."
Whenever we say "Samsung" we're almost always
referring to "Samsung Electronics," but Samsung Group
is made up of about 80 companies most of which are
named "Samsung [thing]," Samsung Electronics being
one of them.
Besides the usual Samsung Electronics product roster of
phones, tablets, wearables, semiconductors, display
panels, TVs, laptops, printers, cameras, home theaters,
and home appliances, Samsung Group makes gigantic
container ships , arctic ice breakers, self-propelled
howitzers , credit cards , oil-refining plants , power
plants, wind turbines, water treatment facilities, steel
mills, life insurance , theme parks , ultrasound machines ,
X-ray scanners , Aperture Science-style robotic
machine-gun sentries , and the world's tallest
skyscrapers (like the Burj Khalifa).
Samsung's setup of companies within companies can
lead to crazy situations like one part of Samsung
Group buying another part of Samsung Group for billions
of dollars.
Samsung likes to cast a very wide net. You can see that
in the company's smartphone lineup, the makeup of
Samsung Electronics lineup in general, and in Samsung
Group. The hunt to offer every product in every category
has created a sprawling company, while Apple and
Google seem to want to pick and choose their hardware
battles with a more focused lineup.