A "minor" fire reportedly broke out earlier yesterday at the manufacturing facility owned by Samsung SDI in Tianjin, Northern China. Reported by Bloomberg, SDI spokesperson has been said to have confirmed that the fire was a minor incident, and broke out at the plant's waste depository area, leaving production lines unaffected.
Samsung SDI, an affiliate of Samsung Electronics, was the company behind the infamous battery flaw that led to serial explosions and eventual global recall of the Samsung Galaxy Note7. Seeing that the company has already faced much ridicule owing to the manufacturing and design flaws that led to the exploding Note7s, any trace of fire or explosions, particularly at the same company's manufacturing hub, were bound to be noticed.
With much of the world chuckling to the turn of events, SDI has since clarified that nobody was hurt in the fire, and no lines of production of batteries were affected. Following probes into the Note7 fiasco confirming the root cause as the battery flaw, SDI has reportedly invested $129 million in safety procedures to avoid any such mishap, ever again. That, though, probably did not include incidental fires at the very basic level of infrastructure – the manufacturing plant.
Despite Samsung SDI playing it down, The Guardian has reported that the one of the main components of the latest wasteland fire at SDI were discarded faulty batteries. Despite being played down as "minor", the fire took 19 trucks and 110 firefighters to finally be extinguished. The incident comes just as the entire world was beginning to forget about the Galaxy Note7, and look forward to the soon-to-launch Galaxy S8 lineup.
Samsung Electronics has chosen mostly to stick with SDI for batteries of the Galaxy S8. Reassuringly, no harm was inflicted upon anyone in this fire, and we hope for similar reassurance with the Galaxy S8's eventual performance as well.