iPhones _ Samsung Inside
By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter
The official title of the famous new gadget is the iPhone. However, its real name may have to be the Samsung phone since it has many components made by Samsung.
High-tech sites such as iFixit.com took iPhones, which had their debut in the United States last week, apart to see which outfits are supplying the components of the highly-anticipated gizmos.
The dissection revealed many of cornerstone parts were produced by Samsung Electronics, Korea's No. 1 firm by any measure, and its sister companies.
First of all, Samsung made the iPhone's main processor and flash memory chips.
The former takes charge of orchestrating the overall operation of the iPhone while the latter stores music or photo files.
In other words, Asia's most valuable tech corporation by market capitalization provided two major components called the ``brain of the cell phone'' for iPhones.
Although foreign Internet sites that tore down the iPhones failed to discover them, other Samsung units also contributed to the compelling handsets.
Samsung SDI is one of the international players that offered lithium-ion batteries for the pricey iPhone _ up to $600.
Samsung SDI is the world's third-largest vendor of plasma display panel modules and has also carved out a double-digit market share in the global competition for rechargeable batteries.
Samsung Electro-Mechanics also shipped capacitors, which save electricity inside the iPhone, to U.S.-based Apple that came up with the much-hyped device.
Originally, the advent of the iPhones was expected to boost Taiwanese companies, which have a competitive edge in manufacturing cellular phone components.
However, the manual teardown demonstrates Samsung Electronics and its sister firms will be the winner of iPhone fever. Apple aims to sell 10 million iPhones by next year.
Samsung Group is Korea's foremost conglomerate and has a total of 59 subsidiaries under its arm. The group chalked up roughly 140 trillion won in sales last year.