Samsung-Xiaomi Cooperation

Lei Jun, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi, will visit Samsung Group and discuss ways to promote business cooperation.
Lei Jun, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi, will visit Samsung Group and discuss ways to promote business cooperation.

 

It has been known that the top management of Samsung Electronics and Xiaomi will discuss ways to promote business cooperation. 

According to industrial sources on July 12, Lei Jun, founder and CEO of Xiaomi will fly into Korea and have a meeting with Jonn Young-hyun, president of memory business in the DS Division at Samsung Electronics. It is predicted that as Samsung’s Jeon is in charge of memories for smartphones and Xiaomi’s biggest business is the smartphone, the two will talk business over scaling up Samsung’s supply to Xiaomi.

The Chinese IT player produces mobile application processors on its own but depends entirely on partners for semiconductor supply. Samsung is also seeking to expand its memory supply to rapidly increasing Chinese smartphones in addition to their own smartphones and Apple’s iPhones.  

Industry watchers analyzed that the meeting between Samsung and Xiaomi related to a recent trend of expanding memory storage in the smartphone industry. In fact, Samsung’s Galaxy S7 Edge and LG Electronics’ G5 were loaded with four giga LPDDR4 mobile DRAMs. Over 20 giga NAND flash memories were installed in the two models. 

It is also predicted that the new iPhone to be launched this November will be loaded with internal memories which can hold up to 250 giga data. But Xiaomi’s latest smartphones do not yet have high-capacity memories. 

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 released in Korea early this year is loaded with a 2GB LPDDR DRAM and a 16 giga memory. Xiaomi need high-capacity memory semiconductors for their new smartphones in order to increase its sales in the premium smartphone market. Xiaomi outsells Samsung Electronics by 12.1% to 6% in the Chinese smartphone market where Samsung is relatively weak.

Samsung will be able to expand overall demand for memory semiconductors by securing Chinese demand in addition to demand in the US and Europe where Samsung smartphones are popular. It is forecast that when and if Samsung Electronic s expand its supply to the iPhone and Xiaomi, the company will supply NAND memories rather than DRAMs.  

 

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