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In what appears to be an attempt to regain ground lost to competitors SK Hynix and TSMC, Samsung has rejigged its leadership, appointing a new co-CEO and naming new leaders across the foundry and memory divisions.
Samsung has appointed Young Hyun Jun as the new head of its Memory (which refers to RAM, not storage solutions) Business and the chair of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology. In addition, Jun has been appointed the co-CEO of Samsung Electronics alongside current CEO Jong Hee Han.
Besides leading the Memory Business, Jun will continue to serve as the Head of Device Solutions (DS) Division, which, in turn, includes the memory, foundry (chip manufacturing), and System LSI (chip design) divisions. In essence, Jun is simply taking over critical business arms that were already operating under his leadership, but will now exercise direct control over the memory business.
Jun was promoted as the head of the Device Solutions arm in May 2024, after having previously led the Future Business Division. The executive has a legacy in storage and memory solutions, and served as the head of the memory business between 2014 and 2017.
Meanwhile, existing CEO JH Han will continue to head the Device eXperience (DX) Division that deals with all consumer electronics and appliances. In addition, Han will head a newly formed committee on ensuring products hold to a good quality. The committee may have been created as a result of Samsung president Jae Yong Lee being upset about the quality issues reported with the first crop of Samsung’s flagship earphones, the Galaxy Buds 3 Pro, announced earlier this year.
Samsung has also announced a slew of leaders for several divisions, Jinman Han, the president of Samsung’s Semiconductor business in the US, will now serve as the global Head of Foundry Business. Seok Woo Nam has also been named the first CTO’s position at Foundry Business after previously serving as the Head of FAB Engineering & Operations.
Additionally, previous CFO Hark Kyu Park has been appointed president of the Business Support task force. Samsung has yet to announce a new CFO.
The reshuffle appears to be a part of Samsung’s efforts to counter Samsung’s “chip crisis,” a mix of poorly performing mobile application processors (AP) aka Exynos chips, lower than expected yield in foundry, and the inability to crack into the core set of suppliers of memory chips for AI data centers.
Samsung has been lagging behind Korean competitor SK Hynix and Taiwan’s TSMC in supplying chips for AI. The leadership also aims to allay concerns about the risk of suffering financial losses if Chinese rivals lower prices significantly to effectively nullify the effect of sanctions proposed by incoming US President Donald Trump, whose re-election has led to a significant slump in Samsung’s stocks over the last few weeks.
