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Telecom Lead Team: Samsung Group is raising its 2012 investment
to $41.4 billion.
Samsung will be banking on logic chips and OLED displays. The group will add
26,000 employees this year, up from last year’s 25,000. Samsung now employs
around 350,000 in total.
The investments will be in everything from building factories to research and
development activities to doing mergers and acquisitions and hiring.
Of the total investment, capital spending will amount to 31 trillion won, up 11
percent from a year ago, Samsung said in a statement.
Some 25 trillion won, or 80 percent of the capital spending, will be from
Samsung Electronics, the world’s biggest technology firm by revenue, and its
display unit, mainly to boost capacity of system chips and OLEDs, said
analysts.
Investment in system chips such as mobile processors and sensors used in
smartphones, tablets, and cameras is likely to exceed spending on its
bread-and-butter memory chips for the first time, reaching 7.5 trillion won, or
some 1 trillion won higher than investment in memory chips, they predicted.
Investment in OLED is likely to rise to 7 trillion won from last year’s some 5
trillion won, and the rest will be spent on LCDs, rechargeable batteries and
LEDs, they said.
Samsung Electronics makes mobile processors to power Apple’s iPhone and iPad as
well as its own Galaxy line of mobile products. Its display unit, Samsung
Mobile Display, is also a near monopolistic supplier of OLED displays, which
are mainly used in high-end mobile gadgets and are set to become dominant in TV
screens to replace LCD.
OLED display revenues are expected to exceed $20 billion by 2018 to account for
16 percent of the total display industry, up from the current 4 percent,
according to research firm DisplaySearch.
The record investment plan comes after Samsung Electronics said on Monday its
U.S. unit was planning to sell around $1 billion in bonds, its first major
overseas debt sale in more than a decade, to fund its chip plant operation.
Samsung didn’t detail whether the funds will be used to expand capacity at
Austin, Texas, its sole and biggest overseas chip plant, which makes chips for
Apple products.
