Samsung Electronics pledges to reclaim top spot in global chip market within three years

Samsung Electronics shareholders enter the venue of the 55th annual general meeting of shareholders at the Suwon Convention Center in Yeongtong-gu, Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, Tuesday morning. Yonhap News Agency

"If Lee Byung-chul, the founder of Samsung Group, was here, I wonder if the executives would be able to sit here. Do you have any thoughts of resigning?" At the 55th annual general meeting of Samsung Electronics held at the Suwon Convention Center in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, on March 20, minority shareholders criticized the company’s sluggish stock price and semiconductor business.

Samsung Electronics was hit hard by the slump in the semiconductor industry last year, receiving its worst performance report since the global financial crisis, and its stock price has been hovering in the low-to-mid 70,000 won range since the start of this year. Some 600 Samsung Electronics shareholders attended the shareholders‘ meeting, pointing out that Samsung Electronics' stock price growth was slow compared to its rival SK Hynix, whose stock price doubled over the past year.

When asked by a shareholder, "Why has the semiconductor business been sluggish?" Kyung Kye-hyun, president of Samsung Electronics, said, “There are many reasons, but there have been downturns in the industry and we have not done a good job.” He added, “I think we have been in the black since January this year. I think you can see that we are on track to some extent this year.” To another shareholder‘s comment that “I think we admitted that we were a step late in high bandwidth memory (HBM),” Kyung replied, “We are better prepared to prevent that from happening again.”

Han Jong-hee, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, who chaired the shareholders’ meeting, said, "As one of the management, I apologize to shareholders for the fact that the stock price did not meet your expectations.“ He added, “This year, as the semiconductor market and IT demand are expected to recover, we will do our best to enhance shareholder value by actively responding to AI-oriented semiconductors and achieving solid performance by expanding the AI-equipped smartphone business.”

Kyung said he hopes to regain the world’s top spot in semiconductors within two to three years. “We will improve our fundamental structure with lessons learned from the past so that we can play a central role in the rapidly growing semiconductor market,” Kyung said. The global semiconductor market is expected to grow significantly year-on-year to $630 billion this year. Kyung predicted that the sales of the company’s semiconductor division will also recover to the level of 2022.

He also revealed that Samsung is developing its own AI accelerator chip called Mach-1. Kyung said, “We are preparing to reduce the bottleneck between memory and GPU by one-eighth so that it can infer a large language model (LLM) with low power (LP) memory."

※This article has undergone review by a professional translator after being translated by an AI translation tool.