Samsung Electronics Enters Strategy Meetings Without Lee Jae-yong... Will There Be a Semiconductor Solution?

[Korea Financial Times, Gwak Horyung] Samsung Electronics is holding a three-day global strategy meeting from June 17 to 19, amid mounting concerns over its business, including its once-dominant position in D-RAM semiconductors.

The Device Experience (DX) Division will begin with the Mobile Experience (MX) business unit on the 17th, followed by the Visual Display (VD) and Digital Appliances (DA) units on the 18th, and a company-wide session on the 19th. The Device Solutions (DS) Division, responsible for semiconductors, will hold its meeting on the 18th.

Roh Tae-moon, Acting Head of the DX Division and President, and Jun Young-hyun, Head of the DS Division and Vice Chairman, are presiding over the meetings. As in previous years, Executive Chairman Lee Jae-yong is not expected to attend in person but will be briefed on the outcomes.
This year’s global strategy meeting will address supply chain restructuring in response to U.S. President Trump’s import tariff policies and the ongoing Iran-Israel conflict.


A critical focus will be the evaluation and response to challenges in the semiconductor business, especially as Samsung faces the risk of losing its 33-year reign as the global D-RAM leader to SK Hynix.

According to TrendForce, Samsung’s share of the global D-RAM market revenue dropped to 34.4% in Q1 2025, while SK Hynix rose to 36.9%, overtaking Samsung for the first time. This shift occurred as SK Hynix secured a lead in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for the AI era, while Samsung struggled for over a year with Nvidia’s disapproval of its HBM3E (5th generation) quality certification.

Micron, the third-largest D-RAM maker, is also gaining ground, being the only one among the top three to increase its sales quarter-over-quarter, with its market share rising to 25%, up 3 percentage points from the previous quarter.
Samsung is expected to focus on strategies to regain leadership with the launch of HBM4 (6th generation) next year, which will be a key topic at this meeting.

The foundry business, which has faced yield controversies, is another challenge. In Q1 2025, Taiwan’s TSMC continued its dominance with a 67.6% share of the global foundry market. Samsung’s share fell by 0.5 percentage points to 7.7%, while China’s SMIC, the only one among the top three to increase sales, saw its share rise by 0.5 percentage points to 6.0%, closing in on Samsung.

Gwak Horyung (horr@fntimes.com)