A person familiar with the matter earlier told Reuters that Samsung's investigation concluded that the battery was the main reason some of the smartphones caught fire. The unnamed source said that Samsung was able to replicate the fires during its investigation and that the cause for the fires could not be explained by hardware design or software-related matters.
Samsung initially identified the cause of the fire as a manufacturing process problem at one of its suppliers, later identified as its affiliate Samsung SDI. However, new Note 7s with what Samsung said were safe batteries from a different supplier continued to catch fire, forcing the company to permanently halt sales of the device.
The press conference on the Note 7 comes a day before Samsung reports its quarterly results. The company's preliminary figures for Q4 showed that despite billions in costs for the recall, it's still growing sales and profits.
