Samsung is spending an insane amount of money to beat Apple to the ‘next big thing’

Samsung hasn’t had the best year financially but it’s not slowing down its spending on R&D. BusinessKorea reports that Samsung spent an astonishing $13.8 billion in research and development in 2014, the single largest R&D investment in the company’s history.

Until recently, many cynics would have argued that Samsung was obviously wasting its money since its only payoff from these kinds of massive investments for a while seemed to be shallow gimmicks such as the Galaxy Gear, the Galaxy Round and the Galaxy Note Edge. However, the Galaxy S6 edge has been turning a lot of heads ever since it was unveiled at Mobile World Congress this year, which may indicate that the company’s big R&D bets are starting to yield tangible results for the first time in a while.

Interestingly, it seems that this increase in R&D spending came at the expense ofSamsung’s Advertising Death Star, which BusinessKorea says saw its budget slashed by nearly 10% year-over-year. More quality products and fewer advertisements sounds like a winning formula to us, although we won’t know for a while whether Samsung has something even better up its sleeve than the Galaxy S6 edge.