Everything looks rosy for Samsung Electronics, with an estimated 15-fold increase in operating profit. But while the company is making profits on DRAM, flash memory, and other chips, thousands of workers are on indefinite strike, and an independent study predicts that Samsung's global market share in chip manufacturing will drop from 31% to just 9% by 2032.

It is fair to say that Samsung Electronics, the chip manufacturing and electronics arm of the Samsung Group, has had a mixed fate of late: AI's insatiable appetite for high-end RAM and flash memory chips pushed prices up 20% in the second quarter of its fiscal year (via Reuters).

Although this growth has slowed, Samsung is still projecting a 23% increase in sales and a staggering 1470% increase in operating profit over the same period last year. This huge increase in profits is largely due to Samsung's decision to cancel write-offs of older chip inventory.

But while the money is clearly rolling in on the back of the AI boom, not all is well at Samsung: the NSEU (National Samsung Electronics Workers Union) just ended a three-day strike demanding better pay and benefits (reported by the BBC), and already today demanding that it begin.

The union has about 30,000 members, and it would only take a few percent of them going on strike to have a noticeable impact on Samsung's productivity, but the company told the BBC that "there [will be] no disruption to production lines."

At a conference discussing Korea's national semiconductor strategy (via X-user Harukaze5719), Ian Jae, Samsung's vice president of global research, lamented the lack of government support for chip manufacturing compared to what the US, Japan and the EU have implemented.

Citing examples such as financial incentives, subsidies, and even harsher penalties for violators of laws regarding technology outflows, Jae also highlighted several independent studies on how the global production share of high-end chips (i.e., below 10nm) will change in the next few years

Jae also noted several independent studies on how the global production share of high-end chips (i.e., below 10nm) will change in the coming years.

Jae argued that by 2032 the U.S. will have a 28% share, the EU and Japan will have 6% and 5%, respectively, and Korea will drop from its current 31% share to just 9%. As for where the other half would be, it would almost certainly be Taiwan's TMSC.

The company's chip foundry is currently second only to TSMC, but while Samsung Electronics' so-called DS division is the second largest revenue generator for the company, its operating profit has been somewhat dismal of late. [Samsung's HMB (High Memory Bandwidth) RAM chips reportedly failed to meet the requirements to be used in Nvidia's Blackwell AI processors, and major fabless companies (AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm) are using Samsung's foundry There is no concrete indication that they are attempting to use it to manufacture top-of-the-line chips.

Even if Samsung were able to get government support and allay labor union concerns, the move to move as much of its supply chain as possible from Asia to the US and Europe means that Samsung is very unlikely to retain its 30% share of the chip industry. However, it is clear that Samsung intends to do everything in its power to remain the second largest chipmaker in 10 years.