Samsung Elec expects $100 million or more sales from advanced chip packaging business

Samsung Electronics expects $100 million or more of revenue from its next batch of advanced chip-packaging products this year, co-CEO Kye-Hyun Kyung said on Wednesday. Samsung set up advanced chip packaging as a business unit last year, and Kyung said he expects the results of Samsung's investment to come out in earnest from the second half of this year. Kyung's remarks were made during Samsung's annual general shareholders' meeting.

Samsung's memory chip business seeks to achieve a greater profit share than its market share this year, Kyung said. Samsung's market share in DRAM chips, used in tech devices, reached 45.5 per cent in the fourth quarter last year, according to data provider TrendForce. To do this, Samsung seeks to secure a competitive advantage in high-end memory chips required by booming artificial intelligence demand, including mass-producing a 12-stack version of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips called HBM3E.

For a future generation of HBM chips called HBM4, likely to be released in 2025 with more customised designs, Samsung will take advantage of having memory chips, chip contract manufacturing and chip design businesses under one roof to satisfy customer needs, Kyung said. Answering a shareholder question on Samsung's recent setback in the current HBM market compared to rival SK Hynix Kyung said: "We're better prepared to prevent that from happening again in the future".

Samsung Electronics shares rose as much as 6.04 per cent on Wednesday, and are set for their highest one-day jump since early September after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the AI semiconductor leader is qualifying Samsung's HBM chips for use. Samsung expects tangible results soon from other memory products being developed for use in AI, including compute express link (CXL) and processing-in-memory (PIM) products, Kyung added.