Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, South Korea’s two memory chip giants, are warning of a prolonged and severe global supply crunch, weeks after the two companies disclosed increased investments in their China wafer fabs to meet surging artificial intelligence demand. During Samsung’s first-quarter earnings call on Thursday, the company said its order fulfilment rate had plunged to a “record low”. In a rare move, customers worried about shortages were already pre-booking memory capacity for 2027,...
The family dynasty behind Samsung is so complicated it regularly makes headline news in South Korea.
When Lee Kun-hee, the patriarch behind Samsung Electronics, died in 2020, his dynasty soon dealt with a crisis on two fronts: first, a multibillion-dollar inheritance tax. The following year, his son Jay Y. Lee was jailed after being convicted of bribing South Korea’s former president Park Geun-hye to win support for his succession. At the time, some observers speculated that the sheer scale of one of the world’s largest death levies could threaten the family’s control over the...
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Jae-yong posed for a widely shared selfie in New Delhi on Monday, drawing attention to the optics of “selfie diplomacy” at a Korea-India summit. The photo was taken during a state lunch using Samsung’s latest foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Z Flip7. The image quickly went viral online on social media and was picked up by multiple media outlets. The moment comes months after Lee drew...