Samsung

The legend says Samsung made a bold 1983 leap into semiconductors. The records say it had quietly bought a near-bankrupt chip maker nine years earlier — and built its empire on distressed assets, licensed foreign IP, and a state that de-risked every step.

Samsung Group did 331 trillion won in 2024 — 13% of South Korea's GDP. The breadth that lets chips fund insurance funds shipbuilding is a moat. It's also the reason the whole thing once hinged on whether one heir stayed out of prison.

Everyone calls Samsung the world's great fast follower. The label is the comfortable half. The harder truth: in 1983 it paid Micron cash to be taught how to make memory chips, then spent into downturns until it owned the market. Now its own students are doing it back.

Samsung is praised for a near-perfect 97% Note 7 return rate. But it skipped the regulator on the first recall, shipped 'safe' replacements that also caught fire, and only hit 97% after carriers, the FAA, and a kill-switch update made keeping the phone impossible.

The story is that Samsung's breadth protects it from the memory cycle. In 2023 the chip division lost KRW 14.87 trillion while group profit collapsed to KRW 6.57 trillion - phones and appliances didn't buffer the blow, they barely kept the company above zero.

Everyone says Samsung's memory chips bankroll the empire. In Q1 2026 the chip division drove 93.8% of group profit - and crushed Samsung's own phone-and-appliance arm 38%, by nearly doubling the DRAM price it charges its sister division.

The myth says Samsung's chip arm quietly subsidizes its phones. The 2023 books say otherwise: KRW 258.94T in revenue produced just KRW 6.57T in operating profit - a roughly 85% collapse from the 2022 peak of KRW 43.38T. Integration didn't cushion the memory crash. It concentrated it.

Everyone remembers Apple winning $1.049 billion against Samsung for copying the iPhone. The award was cut to $548M, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed the $399M design-patent slice, and in 2018 the two sides settled for an undisclosed sum. No final adjudicated price for the iPhone's look was ever paid.

After a record 12 trillion won inheritance tax and 18 months in prison, the conventional read is that the Lee family barely held on. The opposite happened: Lee Jae-yong's stake in Samsung Electronics more than doubled. The succession wasn't survived. It was engineered.

Samsung makes the memory, the display, and the chips in its own phones - the model everyone envies. But its foundry arm fell to 8.1% market share against TSMC's 67.1% and lost over 2 trillion won in a single quarter. Being your own best customer is not the same as being everyone else's.

Samsung's biggest rival is also one of its biggest customers. Samsung Display still commands the largest share of Apple's OLED orders, and Samsung Electronics poured KRW 4.8 trillion into display capital in 2024 to stay there — selling the parts inside the phone trying to kill its own.