Samsung loves "big." Its phones are big, its advertising budget is big, and as you'll see below, its employee headcount is really big, too. Samsung has more employees than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined. We dug through everyone's 10-K (or equivalent) SEC filings and came up with this:
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.
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.