[서울신문] Samsung Semiconductor’s operating profit is pushed to the third place in the world… Building a new factory in the US

Intel No. 1 last year… Taiwan TSMC advances to 2nd place
TSMC operating profit of 22 trillion… Estimated Samsung KRW 19 trillion
Samsung, system semiconductor and foundry profits are low

Bloomberg, WSJ and others reported on “building factories in the US”
“We want Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.”… Key to financial power
Samsung semiconductor sector expected to invest more than 30 trillion won this year

Samsung Electronics’ semiconductor division’s operating profit last year ranked third behind Intel in the US and TSMC in Taiwan.

According to the industry on the 24th, Samsung Electronics’ annual sales of the semiconductor division last year were estimated at 73 trillion won and operating profit of 19 trillion won. In terms of estimates alone, it was behind Intel and TSMC in the global semiconductor market last year. The results are announced on the 28th.

Intel recorded 77.8 billion dollars (about 86 trillion won) in sales and 23.7 billion dollars (26.200 billion won) in operating profit last year. With Corona 19, demand for laptops and PCs increased by 33%, making it the largest sales ever. TSMC announced that it generated Taiwanese dollars in sales of 1.339.3 trillion won (about 52 trillion won) and Taiwanese dollars in operating profit of 5665 billion dollars (about 22.400 trillion won).

TSMC’s operating profit is more than KRW 3 trillion higher than that of Samsung Electronics. The operating profits of the two companies in 2019 were about 14 trillion won, but the gap widened further.

In terms of operating margin, the gap between the three companies was clear. Last year, the operating margin of TSMC was 42.3% and Intel 30.4%, while the Samsung semiconductor division is estimated to be around 26%. Samsung Electronics has a high operating margin of 40% in the case of DRAM, its flagship item, but the non-memory division has a high operating margin of 10%.

Yangpaeng Kim, a researcher at the Industrial Research Institute, said, “Samsung’s main items, DRAM and NAND flash, have been slow to recover as prices have fallen since the end of 2018. The operating profit was higher.”

In the industry, as TSMC invests 12 billion dollars in the US to build a foundry plant, Samsung’s investment expansion is inevitable in order to catch US clients that require a foundry of 3 nanometers or less. There is also a forecast that Samsung Electronics will invest more than 30 trillion won (28.900 trillion won last year) in the semiconductor sector this year. In this regard, on the 22nd (local time), Bloomberg News reported that Samsung Electronics is discussing the establishment of a semiconductor plant in Austin with the aim of operating in 2023 with more than 10 billion dollars (about 11 trillion won) investment. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said that Samsung Electronics is considering the construction of a semiconductor plant in the United States by investing 17 billion dollars (18 trillion won), and Arizona, Texas, and New York are candidates. Samsung Electronics is in the position that “nothing has been decided (related to US investment).”

Park Jae-geun, president of the Semiconductor Display Technology Association, said, “Not only Intel, Qualcomm, and Nvidia, but also in-house application processor (AP) design companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook want to build Samsung’s US factory. It is a question whether Samsung has the capital to make investments in the US and domestically.”

Reporter Jeong Seo-rin [email protected]