Samsung Electronics Co Ltd yesterday said it had sold shares it held in four technology companies, including US chipmaker Rambus Inc and Japan’s Sharp Corp, to free up money and focus on its main business.
The South Korean tech giant also sold shares in Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML Holding NV and US hard drive maker Seagate Technology PLC, it said in a statement.
Samsung — the world’s top smartphone maker, which also manufactures memorychips, TVs and home appliances — has for years bought shares in other tech firms in the semiconductor or display panel industries.
“It was aimed at focusing on our core business by efficiently managing the investments made in the past in line with changes in business environments,” Samsung said.
The news of the sales came as the firm is mired in a major recall of its flagship smartphone over a series of battery explosions.
The global recall of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone raised alarm among airlines and aviation safety authorities worldwide, which banned the device on flights.
Samsung sold off half of a 3 percent stake it held in ASML, and its entire stakes in the other three companies for “efficient management of assets,” it said.
It had held a 4.5 percent stake in Rambus, 0.7 percent of Sharp and a 4.2 percent stake in Seagate.
The firm did not elaborate on the timing or the value of the sales.
Yonhap News Agency estimated the value of the sales to be about 1 trillion won (US$887.9 million), including 600 billion won from the sale of the ASML shares.
Samsung and its sister firms have in recent years divested from noncore operations, as parent Samsung Group sought to streamline business amid a generational power transfer in the founding Lee family.
The group’s chairman, Lee Kun-hee, has been bedridden since suffering a heart attack in 2014, with his son, Jay Y. Lee, widely believed to take over.
Jay Y. Lee, currently the vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, was nominated last week by the firm’s board as a new board member.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts