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| Qualcomm Korea Vice President Kim Jae-kyung speaks during an online seminar about future car technology, co-hosted by the Korea Society of Automotive Engineers, Thursday. / Captured from online conference |
By Baek Byung-yeul
Qualcomm seems to enjoy watching the competition between Samsung Electronics and TSMC in the foundry business as it thinks the two's intense race for leadership in the contract-based chip manufacturing industry will help the U.S. chip design firm take the upper hand.
A top official of Qualcomm's Korea unit said Thursday that the company is trying to maintain good relations with the contract chipmakers and is especially strengthening partnerships with Samsung when outsourcing chip manufacturing orders
"As a chip design company, Qualcomm has been retaining good relations with both TSMC and Samsung by ordering them to produce our chips. For Samsung, especially, we have been in a competitive relationship but on the other hand, we are trying to strengthen ties with them in the foundry sector," Kim Jae-kyung, vice president of Qualcomm Korea, said during an online conference.
The foundry business refers to contract-based manufacturing for companies that cannot afford their own facilities. Samsung has said its goal is to become a leader in this sector by 2030.
TSMC of Taiwan has topped the sector with a market share of over 50 percent. According to market researcher TrendForce, TSMC's market share is expected to be 53.9 percent in the third quarter while Samsung would have 17.4 percent.
Though TSMC remains ahead of Samsung, the top official of Qualcomm Korea estimated the gap between them will continue to decrease as Samsung has its own competence as a chip producer.
"In the foundry business, TSMC and Samsung have been competing fiercely with each other. Technology-wise, TSMC seems to have superiority over Samsung, but the latter also has its own competitiveness as a chip manufacturer. So, the gap between them will narrow," he said.
As the Qualcomm official said, Samsung has been increasingly securing foundry deals from prominent chip design firms such as IBM and Nvidia.
In August, IBM announced that its POWER 10 central processing unit (CPU) chip will be manufactured by Samsung's foundry.
On Tuesday, U.S. graphics chip design firm Nvidia announced its latest graphic chip GeForce RTX 30 Series, which are designed primarily for PC gaming, and it is reportedly known that Samsung has secured a foundry deal to produce the graphics chips.
Industry analysts said Nvidia ordered Samsung to manufacture the RTX 30 chips using Samsung's 8-nanometer chip making technology.
The Qualcomm Korea official also forecasted that the semiconductor business, which has been in downturn, will start to recover in 2021 when smartphone demand rebounds.
"Usually, between 1.5 billion and 1.8 billion smartphones are sold a year. So chips used in smartphones are one of the biggest profit sources of chipmakers but the current market has been backed up," he said.
The online conference was co-hosted by three organizations including the Korea Society of Automotive Engineers to provide insight into emerging future car technologies to industry officials.
Unveiling the company's business strategy in the automotive sector, Kim said Qualcomm has joined the emerging sector to diversify its business portfolio which has been dependent on chips used in mobile devices.
Two LG Group units ― LG Electronics and LG Uplus ― also joined the conference and shared their vision to tap deeper into the autonomous vehicle market, which will use LG Uplus' fifth-generation (5G) network and LG Electronics' vehicle components.
