This month Apple has achieved something almost as remarkable as transforming a phone into an iPhone. It has turned Samsung into an underdog.

That takes some doing. Samsung, with its 220,000 employees and 83 business divisions, astonishingly accounts for a fifth of South Korean exports and has such an overwhelming presence in its home market it is described by one detractor as an “aggressive octopus”. To regard it as the plucky – albeit “copycat” – upstart is the equivalent of getting people to root for Goliath on the grounds that “a big man like that just doesn’t stand a chance”.