Unholy Alliance
IN 2005 HWANG CHANG-GYU, the president of Samsung’s semiconductor
and memory business, traveled with two fellow executives to Palo Alto, to
the home of Steve Jobs.
“I met him with the solution to Apple’s life-or-death problem hidden
deep in my pocket,” Hwang wrote.
In the course of their meeting, he pulled out the NAND flash memory,
as it was called, and put it on the table. He called it “my trump card.”
His pitch? Flash memory was a much more lightweight and efficient
storage device than the traditional hard disk. And Samsung was one of few
companies that could guarantee a rock-solid supply. But as Jobs presented
his vision for Apple on a whiteboard, Hwang knew this was not going to be
an easy meeting.
“At the time he had achieved tremendous success with the mp3 player
and the iPod. But he had concerns about the drawbacks of the hard disk
storage device, which consumed a lot of battery power and was
[susceptible] to shock” from being dropped.
Hwang, who hailed from the southern port town of Busan, had gotten
his engineering doctorate from MIT and completed his postdoctoral studies
at Stanford. His fascination with semiconductors had been kindled thirty
years earlier, when he picked up a book called Physics and Technology of
Semiconductor Devices, by Intel’s legendary co-founder Andy Grove.
In 1999, three years after the collapse of the DRAM semiconductor
market—the original engine of Samsung’s rise—Chairman Lee II was
looking to invest in NAND flash memory. Hwang, at the time a senior vice
president, told the chairman, “Just leave it to me.”