The semiconductor department has always been the main source of profit for Samsung Electronics, contributing 80 percent of the company's profits at its peak. But over the past year, the semiconductor business has become a burden. Samsung Electronics recently released its fourth quarter 2023 financial report, which showed that due to poor performance in the semiconductor department, Samsung Electronics operating profit declined for the sixth consecutive quarter, with a year-on-year decrease of 35% in profit in the fourth quarter. In 2023, operating profit was 6.54 trillion Korean won, a year-on-year decrease of 84.92%. This performance result shows that global demand for consumer electronics will remain weak in 2023, with demand for smartphones and storage chips remaining sluggish.

Samsung Electronics is the world's largest manufacturer of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), widely used in devices such as smartphones and computers. Over a period of time, the global semiconductor market experienced a persistent downward adjustment. In the first half of 2023, memory prices continued the downward trend of the second half of 2022, and DRAM prices fell by more than 60% from their highest point. The volume of shipments and the average selling price of memory makers such as Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix declined, forcing them to reduce production to ease the oversupply situation. Under significant production cuts, storage chip prices have been rising since early November 2023. The data show that total sales of the global semiconductor industry reached $48 billion in November 2023, a year-on-year increase of 5.3 percent, marking the first year-on-year growth since August 2022.

For the semiconductor industry, the worst seems to be over. The United States Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) recently stated that due to sluggish sales of personal computers and smartphones, global semiconductor sales are expected to decline by 9.4 percent year-on-year in 2023. However, semiconductor sales are expected to switch from contraction to growth in 2024, with an expected 13.1 percent growth. The World Organization for Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) recently raised its global semiconductor market sales forecast for 2024, forecasting that global semiconductor revenue will reach $588.364 billion by 2024, with storage chip revenue expected to increase significantly by 44.8%, Becoming the main driving force for semiconductor revenue growth.

Currently, consumer electronics products such as smartphones, laptops and tablets have not yet fully emerged from their lows, but the wave of artificial intelligence (AI) development is changing the landscape of the storage chip market and bringing new opportunities for storage chip makers. In order to cooperate with AI servers that require extremely high computing power, high-density storage (HBM) chips have become a "new favorite". HBM is a chip that processes data faster, and when used in conjunction with hardware such as Nvidia's accelerator, it can speed up the data processing speed of training AI models.

In this product field, various semiconductor companies are expanding their dedicated HBM lines and significantly increasing the production capacity of HBM production lines. According to SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor research and consulting firm, HBM's price is approximately 5 times that of standard DRAM chips, with profitable profits. HBM's proportion of global memory revenue is expected to increase from less than 5% currently to more than 20% by 2026. It is worth looking forward to whether high value-added products can bring performance recovery to semiconductor companies.