Samsung Electronics was founded
in 1969 in Daegu,
South Korea
as Samsung Electric Industries, originally manufacturing electronic appliances
such as TVs, calculators, refrigerators, air conditioners and washers. By 1981, the company had
manufactured over 10 million black and white TVs. In 1988, it merged with
Samsung Semiconductor & Communications. It is noteworthy that Samsung
Electronics has grown in leaps and bounds in a business notorious for cyclical
fluctuations. Founded in 1938 as a food processing and textile purveyor, the parent
group entered the electronic business as late as in 1969 when it created under
its wings an electronic component subsidiary. It was a decision made after
considering the fast-growing domestic demand for electronic goods.
Just one year after its founding,
the Samsung Group
established in 1970 another subsidiary Samsung-NEC jointly with Japan’s NEC
Corp. to manufacture electric home appliances and audio-visual devices. In 1974,
it expanded into the semiconductor business by acquiring Korea Semiconductor,
one of the first chip-making facilities in the country at the time. It was soon
followed by the 1980 acquisition of Korea Telecommunications, an electronic
switching system producer. In February 1983, Samsung’s founder Lee Byung-chull
made an epoch-making announcement, dubbed the “Tokyo declaration,” that his
company would enter the DRAM
(dynamic random access memory) business. And only one year after the
declaration did Samsung became the third company in the world that developed
the 64k DRAM
after the United States and Japanese predecessors. The march from then onward
as the pioneer in the memory chip-making industry has continued to this day for
almost three decades.
Although Samsung Electronics was
already one of the biggest companies in Korea as early as the 1990s, it now is
by far the most important company with unrivaled influence on the economy
through a large network of supplier and partner companies as well as through
its own revenue-generating power. Since the onset of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the company
has become more powerful: While most other high-tech companies were hit by
cash-flow problems after the crisis, Samsung could avoid financial difficulties
by broad-based structural reforms. After the crisis subsided, Samsung emerged
as a global corporation. For four consecutive years from 2000 to 2003, it
posted more than 5-percent net earnings when 16 large conglomerates out of 30
top companies of the nation went out of business in the wake of the
unprecedented crisis.
On 2009 and 2010, the US and EU
fined Samsung Electronics with 8 other memory chip makers for its part in a
price fixing scheme from 1999 to 2002. Other companies fined included Infineon Technologies, Elpida Memory
(Hitachi
and NEC)
and Micron Technology. In December 2010, The EU
granted immunity to Samsung Electronics for its part in informing on other
members (LG Display, AU Optronics, Chimei InnoLux, Chunghwa Picture Tubes and
HannStar Display) of a price fixing scheme. On April 2011, Samsung Electronics
Co. have sold their HDD
commercial operation to Seagate Technology for about $1.4 billion with
payment of 45.2 million of (Samsung-Seagate) shares (9.6 percent of shares)
with value of $687.5 million and the rest will be paid in Cash