According to BusinessKorea, the South Korean Supreme Prosecutor’s Office announced that Lee, Jae Yong will not be sued against the merger of Samsung Group’s subsidiary First Wool and Samsung Products and Samsung’s inheritance rights. This is good news for Samsung, but this Korean company faces more challenges.
Korean media pointed out that the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic is the first challenge facing Samsung, because the company's consumer electronics, smartphones and semiconductor business units will continue to be affected by the epidemic.
The second challenge comes from the Sino-US trade dispute. The report pointed out that the United States is about to implement relevant regulations prohibiting the supply of semiconductor products based on US technology to Huawei. The United States has the world's largest suppliers of semiconductor equipment such as Applied Materials and Lam Research, which means that Samsung Electronics can't get rid of American pressure.
In addition, the rise of China in the global IT industry is the third challenge facing Samsung Electronics. In the liquid crystal display market, Samsung has announced that it will withdraw completely by the end of the year, while Chinese panel manufacturers BOE and TCL Huaxing will accelerate the integration of global resources. In addition, in the OLED display market, Chinese companies are also trying to catch up with Samsung Electronics and other Korean factories.
Specifically, in the TV market, TCL, Hisense and Xiaomi are closely followed by Samsung Electronics; while in the field of smartphones, the market share gap between Huawei and Samsung is gradually narrowing, and the market share of Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo is also in the forefront of the world. In the 5G communications equipment market, Huawei is even better than Samsung.
At the same time, in the DRAM market, Changxin Storage plans to start producing 17-nanometer chips this year, and Yangtze Storage’s 128-layer NAND flash memory is also scheduled to start production within this year; foundry SMIC’s capital expenditure is expected to reach $4.3 billion this year, the main process technology Moving from 14nm technology to 7nm technology, Ziguang Zhanrui is also ready to replace Huawei in China's SoC industry growth roadmap. From this perspective, Samsung may face increasingly fierce competition from Chinese competitors.
In addition, the report also pointed out that the judicial risk surrounding the Samsung Group is also said to be a threat, because Lee and Jae Yong have been under prosecution investigations for many years, but Samsung has not yet proposed a new corporate vision.
