Samsung, which sells one of every three smartphones globally, is adding new features and models to fend off Apple in the high-end market and Chinese makers luring budget customers with handsets for $100. Asia's biggest technology company will announce at least one other wearable device this year, Lee said without elaborating. Wearables: Samsung's Galaxy Gear smart watch. Samsung registered a design in South Korea in October for glasses that can show information from a smartphone and enable users to take calls. Fingerprint reader Sales of the Galaxy S4, the company's current marquee handset, slowed after Apple released the iPhone 5s and 5c in September. The 5s includes a fingerprint scanner, and Samsung is considering using an eye scanner in its top-end smartphones.

"Many people are fanatical about iris recognition technology," Lee said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. "We are studying the possibility but can't really say whether we will have it or not on the S5." Plus size: Samsung's 12.2-inch Galaxy Tab Pro. New design "The release of the S5 will be very important to Samsung," said Lee Seung Woo, an analyst at IBK Securities. "Competition is going to intensify, and it's not going to be an easy year for the company." The Galaxy S4 may have fallen short of consumer expectations because its design was too similar to its S3 predecessor, Lee Young Hee said. The next handset likely will be different, she said without providing specifications, including screen size.

"When we moved to S4 from S3, it's partly true that consumers couldn't really feel much difference between the two products from the physical perspective, so the market reaction wasn't as big," she said. "For the S5, we will go back to the basics. Mostly, it's about the display and the feel of the cover." Wraparound display The timing of the release is after February's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Samsung shipped 91 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, up 4 per cent from the previous quarter, according to an estimate by KB Investment & Securities. The company, the largest maker of televisions and memory chips, is diversifying its product range and using its manufacturing scale to tap new markets. Samsung's next Galaxy Note handset may use a three-sided display so messages can be read from an angle. The latest model will be released in the second half of this year and be aimed at the high-end segment.

"We are targeting consumers who want more professional use and tend to be willing to pay more for handsets," Samsung's Lee said. Wearable devices The market for wearable devices may more than triple to $US30 billion ($33.8 billion) by 2018, according to IHS Global Insights. Samsung will attempt to boost sales of its smart watches by adding functions to check calorie consumption, monitor heart rate and measure stress levels, Lee Young Hee said. "Health-care related functions will be the most inherently tied functions to future wearables," she said. "We see a very big potential from there." The company also sees more growth potential in tablets as it takes on Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle. The tablet market will grow more than 15 per cent annually, with more than 240 million units shipped last year, said Shin Jong Kyun, head of Samsung's mobile business.

Samsung's share of global tablet shipments doubled to about 20 per cent last year, Lee Young Hee said. The company, which shipped more than 40 million units in 2013, aims to drive sales growth of its mobile business, which accounts for more than 60 per cent of the company's operating profit, to fend off margin pressure from the slowing high-end smartphone segment. Samsung announced its largest tablets at CES, unveiling 12.2-inch versions of the Galaxy NotePRO, which uses a stylus, and the TabPRO, which doesn't. The larger screens allow users to split the display into four windows running different applications. "We had put relatively fewer resources and focus, including marketing, on tablets, but from this year we will consider it as one of our key major focuses," Lee Young Hee said. "We still have room to improve." Bloomberg