MANILA, Philippines – Samsung begins its rollout of replacement Galaxy Note7 units Saturday, October 1, in all its service centers.

In early September, the tech giant recalled the flagship phablet after some reports of the phone exploding surfaced. At the point of the recall, 2.5 million units had already been sold globally. Samsung is replacing all of them – the biggest such move in the company’s history.

Following the reports, Samsung looked into the matter and found out that the unit’s battery caused the problem. At a media roundtable, early Friday, Sept 30, Samsung Philippines’ marketing director Chad Sotelo revealed some more details about the battery issue. 

“There was a very slight misalignment of the positive and negative cathodes in certain batteries. As I understand it, there’s a positive and negative cathode and there’s insulation wrapped around it. Obviously the insulation is supposed to keep the battery from burning up even if it hits a certain temperature,” Sotelo explained.

“I believe what the slight misalignment of the positive and negative cathodes resulted to, is when the phone’s or the battery’s temperature exceeds a certain level, the insulation becomes insufficient,” he added.

The error has been fixed, said Sotelo: “We’ve been able to isolate it already. We’ve been able to address it. The isolated battery issue has been fixed. We’ve been able to identify what’s the root cause. More importantly, we’ve been able to adjust our supplier’s manufacturing process.” 

The error, Sotelo estimates, has cost Samsung “probably around a billion dollars.” 

Samsung commissioned two suppliers for the Note7’s battery: one in China, and one in Korea. Sotel says that the problematic batteries came from the latter, which produced 65% of the batteries in the original production run. Sotelo notes that units containing the China battery have not experienced the same problem as the Korean units. 

Samsung’s recall will not discriminate between the China and the Korea-supplied Note7 batteries in replacing the units. (Read: IN PHOTOS: Replacement Samsung Note7 units arrive in PH)

In the Philippines, Samsung will be replacing around 6,500 Note7 units. The new units will have several identifiers such as a green battery indicator and a small blackened-out square on the product ID sticker found on the box. – Rappler.com