Samsung Electronics Betting on Foundry, OLEDs, Chips for Data Centers

Samsung Electronics disclosed its business vision at the Samsung Electronics 2018 Investors Forum held in Singapore on June 4. A webcast provided live coverage of the session.

In the forum, Samsung Electronics introduced its strategies for three growth engine sectors – the foundry business, automotive OLEDs and memory semiconductors for data centers.

Lee Sang-hyeon, marketing director of the foundry department at Samsung Electronics said, “This year’s foundry market will grow by 5% from last year, reaching US$63 billion in terms of sales,” and added, “Samsung Electronics is one of the only three companies that can provide 10 to 7 nano level processing.”

“Last year, our foundry business sales hit US$9.8 billion,” Lee said. “The number of customers this year has approximately doubled. We are expecting an even bigger jump in sales figures.”

Samsung Display highlighted its ambition to expand the application of small and medium-sized organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) to automotive displays.

to IHS Markit, the automotive display market will grow by an annual average of 9% from 2016 to 2022. This is a higher growth rate than the mobile market (5%). In particular, middle-sized OLED market for automobiles will grow from a mere 100,000 sheets to one million in 2020 and three million in 2022.

When PCs led the electronics industry, the memory semiconductor took up 15% in sales of the entire semiconductor market. The proportion is expected to reach 20% in the mobile era and 30% and in the era of data centers.

Jeon Se-won, memory department marketing team leader of Samsung Electronics, commented, “The market size of hardware based on artificial intelligence (AI) will reach US$115 billion by 2025, with the cloud-related market accounting for US$80 billion, an almost 40 times increase.” He added, “The sales of AI services will exceed US$200 billion in 2025.”

Furthermore, he emphasized, “Samsung Electronics is not a provider of components, but a total solution provider. The biggest advantage is that we are approaching the market before our competitors.”