TSMC Apple China chips are working together, and Samsung's good days may come to an end
Samsung can be said to be the leader in the high-tech field, relying on a complete ** chain, Samsung has always been flattering on both sides, but now, they feel huge pressure, perhaps, their glory has come to an end.
i.Samsung is under pressure from all sides.
Although Samsung is the world's largest manufacturer of TVs and mobile phones, their profitability is not strong, from a few years ago, Samsung's revenue has been transferred to chips, it is said that memory chips alone, contributed more than half of the profit.
However, Samsung's memory chip industry has been strongly impacted by Chinese manufacturers. For example, after a few years ago, after Chinese memory manufacturers developed NAND flash memory, the value of the world's SSD market has fallen by 60%, and it is still declining, causing revenue to decline by more than 60% in the fourth quarter of 2022.
The memory chip industry is very profitable, and TSMC's profit margin is as high as more than 40%, so that Samsung has also begun to get involved in the chip foundry industryAfter Samsung set up a chip foundry a few years ago and competed with TSMC, Samsung has become the object of TSMC's scramble in the chip production process.
In 2022, Samsung launched the 3 nm process, using the ring grid process, and TSMC used the Finfet process to ensure the yield and process stability of the product, although Samsung's 3 nm process is better than TSMC, but it is only about 10%, and TSMC's 3 nm process has exceeded 60%, it is said that Apple firmly disagrees with TSMC's 3 nm process, because they feel that this is the only one that allows Samsung to adopt 3 NM process companies, while Qualcomm wants to adopt TSMC and Samsung's 3 nm process.
In addition, Samsung also put pressure on Samsung, because it only relied on a single OLED panel provider in the early days to make a lot of profits, the latter was Samsung's two major profit growth points, but due to Apple's release of LGD, BOE and other manufacturers of OLED screens, resulting in a sharp decline in Samsung's revenue, the industry expects that this year's iPhone 15 and iPhone15Plus production capacity will be provided by BOE 70%, which is bound to have a greater impact on Samsung.
Secondly, Samsung has lost its competitiveness in the entire industry chain.
Over the years, Samsung's profitability has been the chain, and their TVs and mobile have relied more on their industrial chain, and now, Samsung's advantage is being weakened.
As mentioned above, Samsung's main competitiveness lies in memory chips, Samsung accounts for more than 40% of DRAM chips, NAND flash memory chips account for 35% of the world's total, and China is due to the rise of memory chips, making the competition between manufacturers increasingly fierce, the chip industry has entered a trough, and China and Samsung have also reopened a new round of competition.
Samsung's success in the memory chip industry lies in counter-cyclical development, after years of anti-cyclical development, Samsung has won a big victory in the chip industry in Japan and the United States, and in the current downturn in the chip industry, SK hynix, Micron, Armour and other companies have plans to reduce capital expenditure, while Samsung continues to expand production scale, while China's chip industry is developing against the trend,** of memory chip manufacturers plan to double the output of memory chips, so that Samsung's anti-boom expansion plan may fall through.
In the field of tablets, BOE will achieve a huge victory, because Apple uses a large number of BOE's OLED screens, so that the gap between Samsung and China's OLED screens represented by BOE is getting smaller and smaller, and China's mobile phones occupy nearly 50% of the market in the world, and BOE's OLED screen will also be replaced by Chinese handheld devices, so Samsung's OLED screen market share will decline sharply.
Samsung is pinning its hopes on Apple to surpass Samsung sooner, and there are rumors that the company is accelerating the development of micro LEDs and micro LED panels to replace the micro LEDs and micro LED panels offered by Samsung, a move that will shake up Samsung's position.
With both of Samsung's main production lines suffering a double blow from China and Apple, and its struggling chip manufacturing is not satisfactory, perhaps the decline in earnings in Q4 2022 is just the beginning of its return to the top, and its glory is no longer expected to really end.