Samsung recently held a Foundry Forum, where the company gathered up a number of its partners and clients in the chipmaking business, and announced that it plans to strengthen its foundry business going forward, among other interests. Samsung also announced plans to deepen relationships with business partners while expanding further into a wide variety of more specialized chip segments, such as chipsets for the Internet of Things, the automotive market, and chips made with artificial intelligence in mind. The company’s three main fabrication businesses consist of foundry, memory, and large-scale integration business, which creates chips for mass deployment purposes. A somewhat recent restructuring at the top levels of the company gives Samsung a good chance to have its management reflect these priorities.
This announcement comes amid relatively good fortunes for the company as a whole, especially its chipmaking division. For example, Samsung not only saw stellar sales of its Galaxy S8 flagship due partly to being the first in line to get Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 835 chipset, but also got the contract to manufacture the chips based on Qualcomm’s design. Meanwhile, Samsung is marching quickly toward the manufacture of 7-nanometer chips of all sorts. Though rival TSMC beat Samsung to the punch and won a contract with Apple on future iPhone and iPad devices for its troubles, Samsung will be free to implement their cost-cutting, power-saving 7-nanometer solution in just about all of the ways that it has so far implemented and contracted its 10-nanometer manufacturing process and the chips that have been made using it thus far.
Samsung has been one of the top competitors in the field of chip manufacture for quite some time, and that momentum shows no signs of stopping. Samsung’s foundry business, likewise, is one of the company’s top cash cows, and that shows no signs of slowing in the near future. Samsung’s other two “pillar” businesses are set to cater to potentially upcoming demand spikes for AI-specialized chips and ready-made systems for mass-deployment computing, but until those two market changes come to pass, manufacturing chips to spec for others will continue to be one of the company’s main priorities, and important sources of income.