Samsung's First Acquisition in 2019
Samsung Electronics will acquire Israeli multi-camera maker Corephotonics. This is the company’s first acquisition of this year and the third after vice chairman Lee Jae-yong came back to management in February last year.
Corephotonics is regarded as a technologically advanced company. It sued Apple for infringing its technology.
Financial industry and foreign news reports say that the Korean tech giant will finalize acquisition of the stake in Corephotonics held by its largest shareholder by the end of this month. The total acquisition value is between US$150 million and US$160 million (165 billion to 180 billion won). Corephotonics was founded by Professor David Mendlovic at Tel Aviv University in 2012 and has core technologies related to multi-camera such as optical zoom, low-light shooting and wide-angle photography.
Corephotonics' technology is rated as the highest in the industry. The lawsuit with Apple illustrates the technological prowess of Corephotonics. The startup filed a lawsuit with a U.S. court in July last year against iPhone maker Apple for violating its four patented technologies.
Samsung has continued to cooperate with Corephotonics through investment and technology partnership as it highly valued the startup’s state-of-the-art technologies. Samsung Venture Investment has invested US$15 million in Corephotonics with Taiwanese company Foxconn and Mediatech in early 2017. In addition, Corephotonics’ technologies have been used in Samsung smartphones released after the Galaxy Note 8, which came out in September of 2017.
Meanwhile, this is Samsung’s third acquisition after vice president Lee Jae-yong's return. The company has acquired Kngine, a U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) search engine, in March last year and Zhilabs, a Spanish network quality analysis and solution company, in October last year.