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Samsung Electronics
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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
삼성전자 주식회사
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| Formerly | Samsung Electronics Industry Co., Ltd.[1] | ||||||||||||
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| Type | Public company[1] | ||||||||||||
| Traded as | KRX: 005930[1] | ||||||||||||
| Founded | 13 January 1969[1] | ||||||||||||
| Headquarters | Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea[1] | ||||||||||||
| Industry | Consumer electronics Semiconductors[1] | ||||||||||||
| Products | DRAM NAND flash memory High Bandwidth Memory Smartphones Televisions Home appliances[1] | ||||||||||||
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| Headquarters |
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The Suwon campus in Gyeonggi Province — the company's registered head office and its main research site
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| Official links |
| Homepage | Newsroom | Semiconductor | YouTube | Instagram | LinkedIn[7] |
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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (삼성전자 주식회사) is a South Korean company that makes memory chips, smartphones, televisions, display panels and home appliances. It is the largest company in South Korea by revenue and the biggest member of Samsung Group, the country's largest business group. Its registered head office is in Suwon, about 30 kilometres south of Seoul.[1]
The business is split into two halves. Device Solutions, usually shortened to DS, makes semiconductors: DRAM, NAND flash memory and High Bandwidth Memory, plus chips made to order for other companies. Device eXperience, or DX, makes the finished products people buy — Galaxy phones, televisions, fridges and washing machines. Two subsidiaries sit alongside them: Samsung Display, which makes screens, and Harman International, which makes car audio and dashboard systems.[4][8]
Samsung was founded in January 1969 as Samsung Electronics Industry, assembling radios and televisions. It entered the chip business in the 1980s and became the world's largest maker of memory chips in the mid-1990s, a position it has held for most of the time since. It has also been the world's best-selling television brand every year since 2006, and it has vied with Apple for first place in smartphones for more than a decade.[1][9]
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom that began in 2023 sent memory prices sharply higher and made the chip half of the company far more valuable than the rest. Samsung reported revenue of ₩333.6 trillion and an operating profit of ₩43.6 trillion for 2025. In the first quarter of 2026 alone it earned an operating profit of ₩57.2 trillion — more than the whole of the previous year.[4][8]
1 History✎
1.1 Beginnings (1969–1982)✎
Samsung Group was founded in 1938 by Lee Byung-chul as a trading firm in Daegu. Samsung Electronics Industry was set up on 13 January 1969 to make consumer electronics, starting with black-and-white televisions and radios built under licence from Japanese partners.[1][10] The shares were listed on the Korea Stock Exchange in Seoul on 11 June 1975 and have traded there ever since.[1]
Samsung bought a small chipmaker, Korea Semiconductor, in 1974. For nearly a decade the venture went nowhere.[11]
1.2 Into memory chips (1983–1999)✎
On 8 February 1983, from a hotel in Tokyo, Lee Byung-chul telephoned Seoul to say that Samsung would enter the semiconductor business whatever it cost. The call is remembered in Korea as the Tokyo Declaration. Samsung built a chip plant in six months, against an industry norm of about eighteen, and produced a 64K DRAM chip later that year. Korea became the third country able to make one, after the United States and Japan.[11]
The gamble took a decade to pay off. Samsung developed the world's first 256-megabit DRAM in August 1994 and became the largest memory chip maker soon afterwards.[12] Its two main domestic rivals, Hyundai Electronics and LG Semicon, were pushed together into a single company by the government after the 1997 Asian financial crisis; that company is today SK hynix.[13]
1.3 Phones, screens and the rise to the top (2000–2016)✎
Samsung spent the 2000s turning a reputation for cheap products into a reputation for good ones. It became the world's best-selling television brand in 2006 and has stayed there every year since.[9] The Galaxy line of Android phones, launched in 2010, grew into the best-selling smartphone range in the world.
In November 2016 Samsung agreed to buy Harman International, an American maker of car audio and dashboard electronics, for about US$8 billion. It remains the company's largest acquisition. Harman also owns the JBL, Harman Kardon and AKG audio brands.[14]
That same year brought the worst product failure in the company's history. The Galaxy Note7, launched in August 2016, began catching fire. Samsung replaced the phones, the replacements caught fire too, and in October it stopped making the model altogether. About a million units were recalled in the United States alone. An investigation announced in January 2017 blamed two separate manufacturing faults in the batteries, from two different suppliers.[15][16]
1.4 Court cases and succession (2016–2022)✎
Samsung was also caught up in the political scandal that removed South Korea's president, Park Geun-hye, from office. Lee Jae-yong, the grandson of the founder, was arrested in February 2017 and convicted of bribery. He was released on parole in August 2021, having served about eighteen months, and pardoned by President Yoon Suk-yeol a year later.[17][18]
Lee Kun-hee, who had led Samsung since 1987, died in October 2020. His heirs faced an inheritance tax bill of more than US$10 billion, reported at the time as the largest in Korean history, payable in instalments over five years.[19] Lee Jae-yong became executive chairman in October 2022.[2]
A second case ran alongside the first. Prosecutors argued that a 2015 merger of two Samsung affiliates had been rigged to help Lee take control of the group, and charged him with accounting fraud and stock manipulation. He was acquitted in February 2024, the acquittal was upheld on appeal, and the Supreme Court settled the matter in his favour in July 2025.[20]
1.5 The AI memory boom (2023–present)✎
The rise of AI from 2023 changed the memory business. Data centres needed enormous quantities of a specialised product, HBM, and Samsung was slow to deliver it. Its HBM3E chips took more than a year to pass NVIDIA's tests, finally clearing them in September 2025, by which time SK hynix had taken most of the market.[21]
Ordinary memory then rescued the year. Contract prices for DRAM roughly doubled between late 2025 and early 2026, and Samsung, which sells more standard memory than its rivals, benefited most. It regained the lead in DRAM revenue in the last quarter of 2025 after losing it to SK hynix earlier that year.[22] In February 2026 it began shipping HBM4, the next generation, and said it expected HBM sales to more than triple during the year.[23]
The company also lost one of its two chief executives. Han Jong-hee, who ran the consumer products half of the business, died of a heart attack in March 2025 at the age of 63.[24] Samsung ran with a single chief executive until November 2025, when it restored the two-CEO arrangement and named Roh Tae-moon to the vacant post.[25]
2 Chips✎
2.1 Memory✎
Memory is Samsung's largest and most profitable business. It leads both of the two main kinds. Counterpoint Research put its share of DRAM revenue at 38% in the first quarter of 2026, ahead of SK hynix on 29%, and its share of NAND flash at 29%, the largest of six suppliers.[26][27]
Chipmakers compete by shrinking the patterns printed on each wafer. Samsung was the first to use extreme ultraviolet light, known as EUV, to print DRAM in volume, shipping its first million EUV-made modules in March 2020.[28] Its current products cover most uses of memory: DDR5 for servers, GDDR7 for graphics cards, and the low-power LPDDR family for phones and AI machines.
NAND flash stores data permanently, and is built by stacking layers on top of one another. Samsung began mass-producing its ninth generation of stacked NAND, with 286 layers, in 2024, and showed a design with more than 400 layers at a technical conference in February 2025.[29]
2.2 High Bandwidth Memory✎
HBM is DRAM stacked in layers and wired vertically, so that data moves much faster than it can across a flat chip. It is the memory AI accelerators use, and it is the one part of the memory market where Samsung has not led. SK hynix reached each of the HBM3 and HBM3E milestones first, and Samsung struggled for over a year to get its own HBM3E accepted by NVIDIA, the largest buyer.[21]
Samsung says it was the first to ship commercial HBM4, in February 2026. The chips stack twelve layers, hold up to 36 gigabytes, and move up to 3.3 terabytes of data a second — about two and a half times the previous generation.[23] Reports through the first half of 2026 disagreed about how much of NVIDIA's HBM4 order Samsung had actually won, and neither company had confirmed a figure by July 2026.[30]
2.3 Foundry✎
A foundry makes chips that other companies design. Samsung is the only firm in the world that runs a large foundry and a large memory business at the same time, but the foundry is a distant second to Taiwan's TSMC. TrendForce put TSMC at 72% of foundry revenue in the first quarter of 2026 and Samsung at 6.5%.[31]
Samsung was first in the industry to mass-produce chips using gate-all-around transistors, a new switch design, at its 3-nanometre node in June 2022.[32] The foundry has nonetheless lost money every year since 2022, and its head said in June 2026 that a full profitable year was unlikely before 2028.[33]
Its largest win came in July 2025, when Tesla agreed to buy US$16.5 billion of chips through to the end of 2033, to be made at Samsung's new plant in Texas.[34]
3 Phones, televisions and appliances✎
3.1 Phones✎
Samsung and Apple have traded the lead in smartphones for years, and the gap between them is small. Apple sold slightly more phones than Samsung over the whole of 2025; Samsung was ahead again in the first quarter of 2026, with 62.4 million shipments to Apple's 61.8 million.[35]
The Galaxy S series is the flagship line. Samsung also makes folding phones — the Z Fold, which opens into a small tablet, and the Z Flip, which folds shut like a compact. Since the Galaxy S24 in 2024 the phones have been sold on their AI features, under the name Galaxy AI. The Galaxy S26 range was announced in San Francisco in February 2026.[36]
Samsung is unusual in designing its own phone processors, called Exynos, while also buying processors from Qualcomm. Which chip a Galaxy phone contains depends on the model and on the country it is sold in.
3.2 Televisions and home appliances✎
Samsung has been the world's best-selling television brand every year since 2006 — twenty years in a row — with 29.1% of television revenue worldwide in 2025.[9] The same division makes fridges, washing machines, air conditioners and ovens. It is the weakest part of the company by profit: in the last quarter of 2025 the television and appliance business lost ₩0.6 trillion, while every other division made money.[4]
3.3 Screens, sound and networks✎
Samsung Display, a subsidiary, makes the OLED panels used in phones and televisions. Apple is among its customers: it was reported in 2025 as the sole screen supplier for Apple's folding iPhone.[37] The division brought in ₩6.7 trillion of revenue in the first quarter of 2026.[8]
Harman, bought in 2016, sells car audio systems, dashboard displays and consumer audio. It recorded revenue of about ₩15.8 trillion in 2025, reported as its best year since the takeover.[14][38]
Samsung also sells mobile network equipment, competing with Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei. Its best-known contract is a US$6.6 billion agreement signed with Verizon in 2020. The business has shrunk since: revenue in the first quarter of 2026 fell by a quarter from a year earlier, to about ₩0.6 trillion.[39]
4 Factories✎
Chip factories are called fabs. Samsung's are concentrated in the south-west of Gyeonggi Province, within an hour or so of Seoul.
- Giheung and Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province — the older campuses, and the site of the company's semiconductor research centre. Hwaseong received Samsung's first High-NA EUV machine, the most advanced chipmaking tool built, in 2025.[40]
- Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province — the company's main memory site, built in phases known as P1 to P5. P4 is being fitted out for the newest DRAM and for HBM4. In May 2026 Samsung said it would bring the next stage of the expansion forward by six months to keep up with AI demand.[41]
- Onyang and Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province — packaging plants, where finished wafers are cut up and assembled into chips. Both are being expanded for HBM, which is far harder to package than ordinary memory.[42]
- Taylor, Texas, United States — a foundry site announced in 2021 and repeatedly delayed. Samsung skipped a planned process node to go straight to 2 nanometres, and now expects production in 2027. It was awarded up to US$4.745 billion under the American CHIPS and Science Act.[43][44]
- Xi'an, China — two NAND flash fabs, among the largest of their kind anywhere.
A national cluster is also being built at Yongin, south of Seoul, where Samsung plans several fabs on a single site. Its first Yongin plant has been brought forward to 2029.[45]
The Chinese fabs became a regulatory problem in 2025. American rules govern which chipmaking equipment may be sold to factories in China. Samsung had held a standing permit covering its Chinese sites; the United States revoked it with effect from 31 December 2025 and replaced it with an annual approval process.[46]
5 Ownership and management✎
Samsung Electronics has no parent company. Instead the founding family controls it through a chain of stakes held by other Samsung firms. At the end of 2024 the largest shareholders were Samsung Life Insurance with 8.6%, the National Pension Service — South Korea's state pension fund — with 7.3%, and Samsung C&T with 5.0%. The Lee family's own direct holdings are much smaller; their influence comes from controlling Samsung C&T, which in turn holds much of Samsung Life.[6]
Lee Jae-yong has been executive chairman since October 2022. He is not a member of the board.[2] Day-to-day management is split between two chief executives: Jun Young-hyun runs the chip business, and Roh Tae-moon runs everything else. The board is chaired by Shin Je-yoon, an independent director — someone who is not an employee of the company — and five of its eight seats are held by independents.[3][25]
6 Finances✎
Figures are as reported by the company. One trillion won is roughly US$700 million.[4][8]
| Period | Revenue | Operating profit |
|---|---|---|
| FY2024 | 300.9 | 32.7 |
| FY2025 | 333.6 | 43.6 |
| 1Q 2026 | 133.9 | 57.2 |
Both 2025 figures were records, and both were beaten inside a single quarter the following year. The chip division supplied most of the difference: it earned ₩53.7 trillion of the ₩57.2 trillion operating profit in the first quarter of 2026, on revenue of ₩81.7 trillion.[8] Samsung's guidance for the second quarter, published on 7 July 2026, put revenue at about ₩171 trillion and operating profit at about ₩89.4 trillion.[47]
The company spent a record ₩37.7 trillion on research and development in 2025.[4]
7 Market position✎
Gartner ranked Samsung the second-largest semiconductor company in the world for 2025, with revenue of US$72.5 billion, behind NVIDIA and ahead of SK hynix.[48] It leads the world in DRAM, in NAND flash, in televisions and in OLED screens, and is second in HBM and in foundry work.[26][27][9][31]
Samsung is normally the most valuable company on the Korean stock market by a wide margin, and it is large enough that its share price moves the national index on its own. In June 2026 SK hynix briefly overtook it for the first time, on the strength of that company's HBM lead, before Samsung regained the position within days.[49]
8 See also✎
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World's 10 largest semiconductor companies
by 2025 revenue · Gartner, January 2026
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- Samsung Group
- SK hynix
- LG Semicon
- Dynamic random-access memory
- Flash memory
- High Bandwidth Memory
- Micron Technology
- TSMC
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