During the low tide, the flash chip architecture continued to plummet. Affected by the environment, Samsung ’s semiconductor business also performed poorly. This year ’s Q3 profit was only 3.05 trillion won, compared with the same period last year. (13.65 trillion won)
Construction foundry: 7nm products are all scrapped and fake news
On August 21, Samsung executives also talked about their powerful chip technology at the Galaxy Note10 conference. The next day, a news broke the upstream and downstream of the electronics industry-Samsung’s 7nm foundry rollover!
Samsung’s Qualcomm 7nm 5G chip Snapdragon SDM7250 was exposed due to yield problems, all products were scrapped, and Samsung’s own processors also had the same problem.
Although relevant people in Qualcomm formally responded through the media that this is downright fake news, and they have been cooperating in communication, but Samsung originally fell behind TSMC in the 7nm foundry competition. This negative news came out, not only for Qualcomm The reputation of the company is hurting, and it is also likely to damage the trust of other customers.
Although Samsung TSMC ’s competition in advanced processes seems to be fiery, Samsung is far worse than TSMC in terms of 7nm orders and changes in global market share.
In terms of global foundry market share, in Q3 2019, TSMC increased by 1.3% to 50.5%, while Samsung increased by 0.5% to 18.5%. The gap between the two parties in the wafer foundry market share is still expanding. .
Samsung also announced earlier this year that it will provide mature 8-inch wafer foundries to provide multi-project wafer services for small and medium-sized enterprises. / span>. The problem is that China ’s SMIC and Huahong are also very mature in 8-inch foundry technology. There are many choices in the market. Whether Samsung can attract more customers is still a question mark.
It seems that Samsung ’s small target of raising the foundry market share to 25% in the five years proposed in 2017 still faces many unknowns.
Mobile phone storm: Folding screen phones repeatedly jump tickets
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In January 1993 in Los Angeles and March in Tokyo, Samsung ’s President Lee Kin Hee felt a chill.
Whether it is Los Angeles or Tokyo, the prominent positions of shopping malls and retail stores are occupied by American and Japanese products, while Samsung products are placed in remote corners and covered with dust.
In June of the same year, before traveling to Frankfurt, Germany, the contents of a videotape shocked Li Jianxi: a washing machine cover was not the correct size and could not be assembled, but the workshop workers casually trimmed off the excess and reluctantly installed it.
The profit space of the low-price competition strategy is increasingly being squeezed. The quality of the product is Samsung’s right to survival. If it is not changed, it will be eliminated by the market at any time in the future. Realizing the urgency of pursuing quality, Li Jianxi called the presidents of Samsung to Frankfurt, and said the words that will have a very important influence on Samsung’s future: “Except for the wife and children, everything must be replaced!”
Li Jianxi’s reform measures are very specific. For example, for the mobile phone department, he asked to produce a mobile phone comparable to Motorola by 1994, otherwise Samsung will withdraw from the mobile phone business.
It is only possible to survive for a long time by breaking the boat. Since then, Samsung has returned its sight from quantity to quality, laying a solid foundation for its successful entry into the high-end market in the future.
▲ Samsung President Lee Kin Hee
Overcast in March 1995, more than 2,000 Samsung employees were tied with “guaranteed quality” cloth strips, and they were lined up in a glance at Samsung Electronics Gumi. “> (Gumi) on the sports field of the Division.
In the center of the stadium, there are 150,000 wireless telephones, mobile phones and fax machines, which have a market value of 50 billion won.
In front of everyone, these products have been incorporated into the efforts of countless employeesHe was smashed into a bone by a hammer instantly, and then engulfed in a fiery flame and turned into a mass of ashes.
In this scene, Samsung’s attitude of “seeing unqualified products as the source of evil” is almost shocked and tragic into every employee’s memory.
The old Samsung is shattered in the ashes, and a Samsung with a more ambitious goal is accompanied by the beating flames.
The lesson of blood has verified Li Jianxi’s forward-lookingness. The direct consequence of one-sided pursuit of the expansion of production scale is that when the Asian financial turmoil swept through 1997, Samsung had no resistance.
At the critical moment, Yin Zhonglong, then CEO of Samsung, was in dire straits order and radically reformed the business model: streamlining the business scope, drastically reducing inventory, and concentrating resources on the emerging strategic direction of high added value. Resolutely quit.
▲ Yin Zhonglong, former CEO of Samsung
In this change, Samsung cut off nearly 20 types of weakly profitable businesses, divested 42 low-value-added services and logistics departments, released a large amount of occupied funds, and transferred low-competitive product manufacturing plants to Southeast Asian countries. , To form a new management framework with the four major industries of electronics, finance, machinery, and chemical industry.
Based on this, Samsung successfully emerged from the shadow of the financial crisis and opened the prelude to the dominance of the electronics industry.
04 Mastering the skills of foreign players, DRAM surpasses Japanese companies
Samsung values quality but does not aim for a 100% yield.
It is a shrewd and terrible learner, imitating and borrowing when the skills are not as good as people, then go rough to get the best, and quickly catch up with its predecessors.
The 1990s, the era of mainframe computerstps: //img.huxiucdn.com/article/content/201911/28/143635684903.jpg? imageView2 / 2 / w / 1000 / format / jpg / interlace / 1 / q / 85 “data-w =” 800 “data -h = “662”>
▲ Apple A4 chip
Although Samsung was the number one DRAM and NAND market share in the world at that time, but the memory was greatly affected by the market situation, so Samsung planned to do wafer foundry early, but it has not been well-known. The iPhone single order came at just the right time, and Samsung’s foundry business ushered in an opportunity.
In just three years, Samsung’s ranking in the foundry industry jumped from tenth to third.
At this time, Samsung’s powerful imitation capabilities are working again. By accepting the iPhone processor, Samsung has learned a lot of smart phone technology tips, and applied these learned tips to its own Galaxy smartphones. It even launched the Galaxy known as the “iPhone killer” on Valentine’s Day in 2011. S2 phone.
In December 2011, Samsung topped the global mobile phone market share. The 7-year patent battle between Apple and Samsung has also begun.
In 2012, the court ruled that Samsung had “openly plagiarized” the design of the iPhone and iPad, and Apple had failed to claim $ 1 billion in compensation. In 2015, Apple reduced the amount of compensation to US $ 548 million, and Samsung still did not fully pay. In May 2018, the court ruled that Samsung paid a total of USD 539 million to Apple. Samsung continued to appeal against the ruling, and it was not until June of the same year that the parties announced a settlement on the patent infringement dispute.
06 Lost orders from Apple, foundry warfare
Samsung has won mobile phone sales, but lost Apple’s chip foundry orders.
Since 2014, TSMC, the founder of the foundry industry, has taken the iPhone foundry cake from Samsung.
TSMC has completed the improvement of production capacity and yield, and achieved a breakthrough in the 20nm process, while Samsung has been slow to move forward in 20nm research and development. Apple, which is advancing “de-Samsungization”, has decisively started to put A-series chips’S order was handed over to TSMC.
Since 2016, TSMC has been the sole supplier of Apple’s A-series chips, and next year Apple’s 5nm A14 chips will also be exclusively supplied by TSMC. Coupled with orders from Qualcomm and Broadcom, which are the first and second runner-ups in fabless semiconductor revenue, TSMC has almost covered the sky in its advanced process business.
Today, in the battlefield of advanced technology of 10nm and below, TSMC, Samsung and Intel are the only three players. At present, Intel’s wafer foundry is mainly used by itself. TSMC and Samsung are the largest in the wafer foundry industry. Opponent.
Previously, “Nikkei Shimbun” published a report saying that during the period 2006-2007, the rise of many electronics businesses in Taiwan made Samsung deeply threatened. Samsung separately threatened Taiwan’s DRAM, LCD, smart phones, and wafers. The suppression of foundry work also prevented the “marriage” of Sharp and Hon Hai.
Whether the news is true or not, at least in the foundry field, Samsung is still behind TSMC.
According to IC Insights, Samsung and TSMC ’s spending in the fourth quarter of this year will reach record highs.
▲ Quarterly capital expenditure changes of TSMC and Samsung in 2019 (Source: IC Insights)
Because it has taken the lead in the mass production progress of the 7nm process, TSMC took the lead in taking orders for chips such as Apple A12, Qualcomm Snapdragon 855, Huawei Kirin 980, AMD Zen2 Ryzen, Apple A13, Huawei Kirin 990 In the bag, it has won more than 100 orders for 7nm chips. When Samsung’s manufacturing process keeps up, all major customers are basically robbed of by TSMC.
It is said that Samsung has adopted a competitive strategy of drastic price reduction in order to regain more orders.
I do n’t know if TSMC ’s capacity is tight or because of other factors. In the past two years, Samsung has finally begun to harvest good news. Last year, Samsung