Samsung's $13.2 billion Expansion Expands Two Ways

South Korea’s daily economic news reported that Samsung Electronics announced on the 25th that it will spend 15 trillion won (13.2 billion US dollars) to expand its memory and foundry business next year. Samsung attempted to squeeze Intel into the world of logic chips and become the new global hegemony. The foundry aimed at TSMC and threatened TSMC.

Samsung said that it will be the largest ever surpassed 15 trillion won in semiconductor equipment, an increase of 50% from this year, 8 trillion won for the non-memory chip business, 7 trillion won for memory chips.

Market attention, Samsung has been actively laying out the field of foundry in recent years, and with the alliance of Grooved, IBM and STMicroelectronics joint R & D alliance, and promote advanced processes.

The legal person emphasized that since TSMC currently has a leading manufacturing process, it is still difficult for Samsung to shake up TSMC’s leadership position in the short term. However, future development must pay close attention.

TSMC chairman Zhang Zhongmou commented on Samsung earlier, stressing that “Samsung is not a friend of TSMC and it appeared in the radar of TSMC more than a year ago.” It revealed that it has indeed threatened TSMC's business development.

Zhang Zhongmou explained that judging the strength of a rival company from the perspective of a competitor must first judge a company’s ability to “have a friend”. In this regard, TSMC has been able to say "upgrading" for the past few years. However, it cannot be denied that TSMC faces more and more challenges.

For example, Apple's latest processor A6, Samsung executives revealed that Samsung's wafer factory in Austin, Texas, has begun production of this chip for Apple, and revealed that with TSMC competing for food orders Apple, action is quite positive.

Samsung's equipment upgrades are considered mild in terms of comprehensiveness, which is similar to the 23 trillion won this year and 21.6 trillion won last year. However, Samsung unexpectedly aggressively pursued the chip division and planned to bet 8 trillion won on the non-memory chip system LSI business and invest 7 trillion won in the memory chip. This is the first time that non-memory chip investment surpassed the memory chip.

Samsung's investment in the system LSI department in 2010 was 3 trillion won, 4.2 trillion won this year, and next year's 8 trillion won nearly doubled this year.