Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s
sanctions against China’s Huawei Technologies
have dented one of Samsung’s biggest rivals
in smartphones, smartphone chips and
telecommunications equipment.
Washington has also cracked down on some
Chinese semiconductor makers over accusations
of industrial espionage, thinning Samsung’s
competition in the market for DRAM chips.
“Things really couldn’t have turned out any
better,” for Samsung, said Young Woo Kim, a
managing director at SK Securities.
“While Huawei’s diminished space in the global
smartphone market will be eventually filled up
by companies like Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi, they
will be buying Samsung’s application processors
(for their devices),” he said.
The most crucial long-term question for
Samsung is if it will evolve beyond being just
a giant in memory chips, smartphones and
display screens.
Unlike Apple, which reaps lucrative returns
from its ecosystem of software and services that
run on its devices, Samsung has yet to forge
an effective business model for gathering and
using customer data to create services. This is
partly because Samsung lacks its own software
for its smartphones, which are powered by
Google’s Android.
In semiconductors, Samsung says it aims to
expand beyond its dominance in memory chips,
which are used for storing information. It plans
to invest more than $100 billion over the next
decade in higher-margin logic chips, designed
to perform a broader range of functions.