A Storm of Apples

Chairman Lee's comment about the storm points out the imminent restructuring of the DRAM industry due to decresed prices, and Samsung's biggest customer Apple's decrease in supply as it lost in the patent wars. Samsung may be free from restructuring but monopoly issues may occur as their market share in DRAM and NAND is about to break 50%. Both opportunities and crises coexist in semiconductors, although it was planned as a growth engine.

Chairman Lee may have also pointed out Apple trying to grow free from Samsung by allocating portions of application processors (AP) to TSMC, in contrast to Samsung being the only supplier of AP. If Apple were able to replace not only APs but also flash memory and DRAM, it would leave them no reason to purchase them from their fierce competitor Samsung Electronics.

The industry responded to Chairman Lee's opinion by saying "we must take the bull by the horns and create irreplaceable products and world class mass production technology." And it is also said that change is opportunity. With the launch of Windows 8, Samsung Electronics has earned a chance to advance into the greatest semiconductor market, the CPU.

Samsung's16^th line is a flash memory assembly line capable of making over 200 thousand units each month, and has started producing ten thousand this month. Samsung Electronics is planning their production by demand, and is also planning to mass produce 10-nanorated NAND flash memory by next year.

The 20-nanorated 2GB DRAM produced from the 13^th line is a green memory product, 50% more productive and with 40% less power consumption. Samsung Electronics is planning to develop a 20-nanorated 4GB DDR3 DRAM based mass storage product, and by next year produce 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB versions of the product family.