A Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is held up with other Note 7 phones on a counter that were returned to a Best Buy on September 15, 2016 in Orem, Utah. (Photo : Getty Images)
Samsung Electronics sought to distance itself from reports of their smartphones catching fire in China on Monday, saying that, for at least one case, it believed the fire was not caused by the battery.
The South Korean tech giant said it was unable to investigate a second reported fire because it could not obtain the phone.
The two reports of Galaxy Note 7 fires appeared on Chinese social media, with phone owners posting photos online of their blackened phones and said the devices caught fire during normal use.
Samsung China said the damage to one of the phones was caused by external heating based from their investigations.
Amperex Technology Ltd., the battery supplier for the Galaxy Note 7 in China, said on Monday that tests conducted jointly with Samsung on one of the burned devices proved its batteries did not start the fire.
"Based on the burn marks on the specimens, we inferred that the source of the heat came from outside the battery itself," Amperex said in a separate statement. "There is a large probability that other outside factors were the cause of the heating problem."
Samsung has previously blamed the cause for overheating and combustion cases to defective batteries, of which most were from the company's own affiliate, Samsung SDI Co., the Wall Street Journal has reported.
The company announced a worldwide recall of 2.5 million of the Galaxy Note 7 earlier this month after several reports surfaced of the batteries overheating or catching fire, prompting U.S. government officials to issue a government recall last week.
It remains to be seen if the damage to Samsung's brand in China, the world's largest smartphone market, will have a lasting impact. Chinese buyers scrambled for refunds on Monday after photos of the charred Note 7s went viral in China over the weekend, with many complaining that, except for a few test devices, China was not included in Samsung's recall, the Wall Street Journal said in its report.
And while China's three major telecom operators have yet to stop sales of the Note 7 officially, several individual branches were reported to have pulled the device off their shelves. The Note 7 was listed as sold out much of Monday on Chinese online retailer, JD.com, the vendor of the two devices that caught fire, although sales resumed online. The retailer was also inundated with refund requests, based on online posts by phone owners. Many consumers that had exceeded the 7-day refund period still sought to return them.
The two damaged smartphones were purchased after Samsung's official launch in China on Sept. 1, unlike the presale units that Samsung is recalling, according to receipts posted by the owners online.
