Samsung Electronics Co yesterday said it is looking at major deals to drive growth, as it faced tough questions from shareholders after its failure to ride an artificial intelligence (AI) boom made it one of the worst-performing tech stocks last year.
The South Korean firm has been suffering from weak earnings and sagging share prices in recent quarters after falling behind rivals in advanced memory chips and contract chip manufacturing, which have enjoyed strong demand from AI projects.
Shareholders slammed management for poor stock performance and called for measures to revive stock prices at the meeting.
Photo: Reuters
Samsung co-CEO and head of semiconductor business Jun Young-hyun pledged to catch up in the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chip race and apologized for the company’s poor stock performance.
“We were late in reading the market trends and we missed out on the early market as a result,” Jun said at the meeting.
Co-CEO Han Jong-hee told investors that this year would be a difficult year because of uncertainties surrounding economic policies in major economies, and that Samsung would pursue “meaningful” mergers and acquisitions (M&As) to address investor concerns about growth.
“There are some difficulties in doing semiconductor M&As due to regulatory issues and various national interests, but we’re determined to produce some tangible results this year,” he said.
In internal meetings, Samsung has acknowledged it has lost ground. This is particularly true in semiconductors, where it lags SK Hynix Inc in HBM chips that Nvidia Corp and others rely on for AI graphics processing units.
“Our technological edge has been compromised across all our businesses,” Samsung chairman Jay Y. Lee said in a message to an internal executive seminar.
“It’s hard to see that efforts are being made to drive big innovation or tackle new challenges. There are only efforts to maintain a status quo rather than shaking things up,” he said.
In recent years, Samsung has also lost market share to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) in contract chip manufacturing and to Apple Inc and Chinese rivals in smartphones.
Jun pledged to shareholders that this year would be “the year when we recover our fundamental competitiveness.”
Still, Samsung faces bigger headwinds than rivals from further US restrictions on high-end chip exports to China, as the country has become Samsung’s most important market thanks to chip stockpiling by Chinese firms.
Han said Samsung would flexibly respond to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs with its global supply chain and manufacturing footprints, while looking at options for US investments.
Samsung is South Korea’s most valuable company, with its market capitalization of US$235 billion accounting for 16 percent of the total value of the country’s main bourse. Nearly 40 percent of investors in South Korean stocks own Samsung shares, according to market data.
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Chizuko Kimura has become the first female sushi chef in the world to win a Michelin star, fulfilling a promise she made to her dying husband to continue his legacy. The 54-year-old Japanese chef regained the Michelin star her late husband, Shunei Kimura, won three years ago for their Sushi Shunei restaurant in Paris. For Shunei Kimura, the star was a dream come true. However, the joy was short-lived. He died from cancer just three months later in June 2022. He was 65. The following year, the restaurant in the heart of Montmartre lost its star rating. Chizuko Kimura insisted that the new star is still down
While China’s leaders use their economic and political might to fight US President Donald Trump’s trade war “to the end,” its army of social media soldiers are embarking on a more humorous campaign online. Trump’s tariff blitz has seen Washington and Beijing impose eye-watering duties on imports from the other, fanning a standoff between the economic superpowers that has sparked global recession fears and sent markets into a tailspin. Trump says his policy is a response to years of being “ripped off” by other countries and aims to bring manufacturing to the US, forcing companies to employ US workers. However, China’s online warriors
RSS