A quadruped robot made by Rainbow Robotics hands a water bottle to a visitor at Samsung Electronics' annual shareholders' meeting at the Suwon Convention Center in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, on March 19, 2025. (Joint Press Corps) Samsung Electronics said Tuesday it has created a robotics business division that reports directly to its chief executive, pulling together talent and technology from across the company as it moves to turn robots into a commercial business.The new RX (Robotics eXperience) business division puts one unit in charge of work that Samsung had until now handled separately, from long-term strategy to commercialization. Samsung Electronics CEO Roh Tae-moon (left) will head the company's new RX robotics division, while Lee Dong-gun, recruited from Hyundai Motor Group, will lead its robotics strategy team. (Samsung Electronics) CEO Roh Tae-moon, who runs the company's Device eXperience division, will lead the unit. Samsung created it outside of its regular year-end reshuffle, which usually comes in late November or early December, in a one-off reorganization devoted entirely to robotics.The people Samsung has put in charge point to what it intends to build. Lee Dong-gun, hired in May from Hyundai Motor Group, where he led robotics strategy including the direction of Boston Dynamics, will head the robotics strategy team. Kim Hyoun-jin (left), an aerospace engineering professor at Seoul National University, and Kim Ui-kyum, a mechanical engineering professor at Ajou University, are both joining Samsung Electronics' new robotics division. (Seoul National University, Ajou University) Joining him are two academics. Kim Hyoun-jin, an aerospace engineering professor at Seoul National University, works on guidance and control for autonomous robots and drones. Kim Ui-kyum, a mechanical engineering professor at Ajou University, designs robotic hands and grippers that can not only grasp objects but turn and reorient them, the kind of dexterity humanoids need for real tasks.That second hire reflects a specific bet. Samsung has singled out the dexterous robotic hand as one of the hardest and costliest problems in building humanoids, noting it can make up 17 to 31 percent of a unit's component cost.The division will be based at Samsung's Seoul R&D Campus in Umyeon-dong, where the company plans to gather its scattered robotics staff and keep investing in offices and labs. It will also build a data factory at its Gumi complex to gather the real-world data robots need before they can work on a factory floor, feeding it back to the Seoul teams to sharpen the machines' intelligence and control.Further research bases are planned in the United States, China and Japan.Samsung raised its stake in Rainbow Robotics, a humanoid developer founded by KAIST researchers, to 35 percent at the end of 2024, becoming its largest shareholder and folding the company in as a consolidated subsidiary. The RX division pushes that earlier investment toward products.The urgency owes something to trouble elsewhere in the business. Analysts estimate Samsung's mobile division may have posted its first quarterly loss in the second quarter, squeezed by rising memory chip prices, while its TV and appliance units keep losing ground to cheaper Chinese rivals. Its chip business, by contrast, is reporting record earnings.Samsung has cast robotics as a growth engine for the Device eXperience division, which houses the consumer products under the most pressure.