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Korean rival Hynix has 24% of its sales in China, Samsung’s DRAM competitor Micron has 41% of its sales there, wireless rival Qualcomm has 53% of its sales in China, Broadcom has 60% of its sales there, NXP has 51% and TI has 45%.
So Samsung is lagging well behind its peers.
And with China representing half the world market representing semiconductor sales of $150 billion annually, Samsung reckons it has to do something.
What that something is looks like being partnering with Chinese companies.
“Working level discussions are under way,” reports the Korea Times quoting a Samsung exec.
With TSMC building a fab in China, and with GloFo said to be talking to the Chinese about building a fab there, Samsung may feel that, to secure future Chinese foundry customers, it needs to put a foundry fab in China.
Sounds like good sense to me Lewis, but there may be some animosity there – China has traditionally been more pally with North Korea than South Korea and maybe China has made things difficult for Samsung politically.
Companies like Huawei are doing bumper business. The Kirin chipset is cheaper and offers solid performance, and so in a market where cost > everything else, Samsung need to work harder on bringing their PPU down.
I don’t know the state of the relationship between China and South Korea, Dr Bob, but I assumed the significance of what Samsung is pointing out is that somehow it is not getting its fair share. So Samsung had $40bn of total revenues last year but only $6bn in China while Qualcomm had $16bn total revenues but got $8bn from China which suggests it’s tougher for South Korean companies to get sales in China than US companies. I don’t know why that might be, but it could be significant that Intel, Qualcomm, NXP, and others have formed jvs with Chinese companies to get access to the China market and maybe Samsung hasn’t – until now that is.
is this a case of “Lies, damn lies and statistics”?
What are the actual values of these figures?
After all 50% of a company’s business could amount to say £1k whereas 10% of a company’s business could amount to £100k. Which is the best figure, 50% or 10%?