Samsung taps Jun Young-hyun to head its struggling chip business

Industry

Published: 21 May. 2024, 09:46 Updated: 21 May. 2024, 18:56

Samsung taps Jun Young-hyun to head its struggling chip business

Jun Young-hyun, then-CEO of Samsung SDI, delivers a speech to the employees at the company's 50th-anniversary event in 2020. [SAMSUNG SDI]

Samsung Electronics replaced the leader of its struggling chip business in a surprise midyear reshuffle announced Tuesday.

The tech giant rarely reshuffles its senior executives in the middle of the year, and the move indicates that salvaging the company's struggling chip business is now a top priority.

“The latest reshuffle is a pre-emptive measure to fortify the chip business's future competitiveness under the uncertain global business environment,” the company said in a release.

Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Jun Young-hyun was appointed head of the company's semiconductor business, the Device Solutions (DS) division, Tuesday.

Jun, a KAIST graduate with master's and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering, joined Samsung Electronics in 2000 as an engineer in its memory business division. He served as president of the division for three years, starting in 2014, before being appointed CEO of the company's battery-making affiliate, Samsung SDI, in 2017.

He was promoted to vice chairman in 2022, acknowledged for his risk management at Samsung SDI after its battery deployed on Samsung Electronics' Galaxy Note7 lit up in fire.

Jun was quick to expand Samsung SDI's business scope from smartphone batteries to EV and ESS solutions, which have now become major source of revenue.

Last year, Jun returned to Samsung Electronics to lead the future business planning team, which was established to find new growth drivers.

Jun's appointment comes as Samsung Electronics' semiconductor business is doing everything in its power to catch up with SK hynix in the high bandwidth memory (HBM) segment, which has become a new battlefield for memory chipmakers as AI explodes in the sector.

SK hynix took an early lead in the game, becoming a sole supplier of the fourth and fifth generation of HBM — titled 3 and 3E, respectively — to Nvidia. Samsung Electronics is still in the verification process.

While the HBM business helped SK hynix turn a profit earlier than expected in the fourth quarter of 2023 after being hit by one of the worst cyclical downturns in the history of the memory chip business, Samsung Electronics was only able to shift to the black in the first quarter of this year.

Samsung Electronics' chip business accumulated 15 trillion won of loss last year.

Becoming an organization lead by a vice chairman, rather than a CEO, is expected to bring the chip business an additional boost.

Vice Chairman Jun's appointment to the DS division “should balance out Samsung's two main business pillars because the DX [Device Experience] division, which oversees the mobile and consumer electronics business, has been lead by Vice Chairman Han Jong-hee while the chip business has been lead by the CEO until now,” one industry source said.

Samsung Electronics CEO Kyung Kye-hyun, who led the DS division for the past two years, was appointed to head the future business planning team as well as the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.

Kyung stepped down from the CEO post as well on Tuesday.

Kyung's dual positions are expected to create synergy, smoothing out the process of turning the institute's technology into tangible business.

Elsewhere, Samsung Medison CEO Kim Yong-kwan joined Samsung Electronics' business support task force, which coordinates affiliates' businesses as well as mergers and acquisitions deals. He will mostly take care of semiconductor-related matters. Yoo Kyu-tae, senior vice president in charge of Samsung Electronics' medical device business, was appointed CEO of the equipment subsidiary.

BY JIN EUN-SOO [jin.eunsoo@joongang.co.kr]