Today I’d like to share some thoughts on Technology Accumulation and Technical Debt Repayment.
Samsung Electronics recently launched Galaxy XR.
This device carries on the lineage of Gear VR, which came out around the mid-2010s, and as the first Android XR platform device co-developed by Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm, I see it as the crystallization of the AR/VR/XR technology Samsung has steadily accumulated over the past decade or so.
In short, Galaxy XR packs in a Micro-OLED display supporting 4K resolution per eye, Eye Tracking that responds to gaze, Pass-Through cameras that recognize the real environment in real time, and Hand Gesture Tracking technology.
It also pairs the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Plus Gen 2 chipset with Google Gemini AI–based interaction to deliver a multimodal experience that recognizes eyes, hands, and voice at once.
What stands out to me is that none of this arrived at this level of polish overnight. During my time there, both headquarters and the overseas labs had already been validating the concepts and PoCs behind these technologies, and this is the result of years of sustained OI activity, R&D, and technology acquisition through equity investment.
MarketLine’s SWOT analysis of Samsung Electronics lists Robust R&D as one of Samsung’s strengths right in the first line.
From my own experience, Samsung’s strength isn’t just that it performs well in the short term — what’s more impressive is its persistence in long-term preparation and technology accumulation.
Even after Gear VR, Samsung kept advancing a long list of elemental technologies together with its global labs — iris recognition, eye tracking, SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping), various graphics rendering techniques,
and Hand Skeleton–based gesture recognition, among others.
I believe it’s this accumulation of unseen technology that made today’s Galaxy XR possible.
Working at Coupang, on the other hand, what I feel is that we’re still in the middle of rapid growth,
and that comes with a parallel effort to pay down technical debt.
Many systems were built and evolved quickly, but securing long-term technical consistency and stability is anything but simple.
Coupang is currently working through this technical debt while simultaneously building the foundation for new technology accumulation — new tech, cloud, AI, data infrastructure, and more.
Ultimately, I think a company’s growth stands on two pillars: technology accumulation and technical debt repayment.
Technology accumulation is about preparing for the future; technical debt repayment is about solidifying the present.
Samsung Electronics secured long-term competitiveness by building up layers of technology over a long time,
while Coupang is rapidly accumulating future technology assets even as it builds its technical foundation at high speed.
Just as technology accumulation isn’t completed in a short time, technical debt isn’t repaid all at once either.
But a company that keeps both processes running steadily in parallel is the one that ultimately secures sustainable technical competitiveness.
Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy XR is the fruit of that kind of long-term technology accumulation,
and I think it’s also a good example pointing to the direction Coupang needs to take toward technology internalization. I hope Coupang, too, benchmarks what technologies need to be accumulated and developed from a tech-strategy perspective, builds them up steadily, and grows into a company that delivers an even higher level of service and value to its customers.
Finally, congratulations to all my many former colleagues at Samsung Electronics whose relentless dedication and persistence made Galaxy XR a reality!
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