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Samsung sings sad song Samsung widens focus, eyes new growth areas By David Lammers, EE Times Kihung, South Korea -- For Samsung Electronics Corp., 1996 was a reality check kind of year: semiconductor revenue fell by 22 percent, to $6.3 billion. This year, Samsung is taking steps on a broad range of fronts--perhaps too broad, some analysts argue. "We are trying to recover the [16-Mbit] DRAM price, and emphasize displays and nonmemory products," said Yoon Woo Lee, president of the semiconductor division. A flurry of design activity, including chip sets for monitors, CDMA phones and a host of digital consumer products, is under way here, where Samsung employs 14,000 at eight fabs, an LCD factory and an R&D complex. Samsung and NEC Corp. are in a price battle in the 64-Mbit DRAM arena, and Lee said Samsung expects bit-price crossover with the 16-Mbit density to come in the fourth quarter. Samsung projects that by year-end, a 64-Mbit DRAM will be priced at about $40 and a 16-Mbit DRAM at $9 to $10 for contract customers. Most 64-Mbit sales today are extended-data-out (EDO)-interface DRAMs for servers and workstations, and Lee said only 20 percent to 30 percent of Samsung's DRAM sales are synchronous DRAMs. Boosting that ratio will depend on the performance of Intel's forthcoming chip sets. At market watcher Dataquest Japan, memory analyst M. Suzuki said that several major DRAM vendors are preparing "super-shrink" 16-Mbit DRAMs, with more than 400 die on each 8-inch wafer, compared with approximately 250 for the existing 16-Mbit designs. Using more advanced process technology to get a smaller die size will cut production costs and create a technology gap between the leaders and the second-tier vendors.
Lee said Samsung's super-shrink endeavors will not result in another 16-Mbit
oversupply situation, "because only a few companies are capable of doing
it." Samsung will not increase its monthly 16-Mbit production over the rest
of this year, adhering to the production-adjustment plan started some six
months ago, which cut 16-Mbit output by 30 percent per month. Though recent
reports indicate inventories are increasing at several DRAM vendors, Lee
denied that an inventory buildup is occurring at Samsung.
(c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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