Samsung Gives Up Former CEOs Initiatives
By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter
Samsung Electronics, the world's top memory chipmaker, seems to have abandoned its tradition of the mid 2000s of announcing the most advanced semiconductor technology at a gala media show every fall under the stewardship of former CEO Hwang Chang-gyu.
After Hwang left the firm in 2008, the much-touted tradition of confirming the so-called ``Hwang's Law'' was also gone as Samsung has not held any event showing off its technological edges for the past two autumns.
Hwang's Law refers to the hypothesis that flash chips double in density every year, which had been the case since 1999 through 2007 thanks mainly to Samsung and its leader Hwang.
``In the past, we were pressed throughout the year to come up with the technology to prove the law was still relevant,'' said a Samsung Electronics researcher, who asked not to be named.
``But the atmosphere became somewhat different after Hwang's departure. Although the pressure for technological improvement is still strong, it's no more about doing that,'' he said.
Compared to Moore's Law, which says that the processing power of leading-edge computer chips will double every 18 months, Hwang's Law gained prominence over the first decade of the New Millennium.
Under the initiative, Samsung developed top-of-the-line flash memories using designs under 100 nanometers scale ― from 90 nanometers in 2002 to 30 nanometers in 2007.
The 30-nano technology, about one-4,000th of the thickness of a human hair, provides the main architecture to build a 128-gigabyte memory card.
Even though efforts in keeping Hwang's Law have enabled Samsung to stay ahead of the pack, the relentless pursuit of it has also burdened the company to some extent.
``We had announced state-of-the-art flash chips as soon as they were developed in the lab. But now we have changed policy and do not disclose them until we are ready to mass produce them,'' a Samsung spokesman said.
This marks an official statement that Hwang's Law will not be abided by in the future.
As a result, rivals could catch up ― Hynix Semiconductor said earlier this month that it had developed NAND flash technologies for digital cameras and cellular phones based on sub 30-nanometer technology.
Samsung, which also has the technology, has downplayed the achievement, saying it is built on imported know-how, not in-house. But experts point out that Samsung's rivals have narrowed the gap.
WiBro
Alongside Hwang, another star CEO of Samsung Electronics was Lee Ki-tae, who headed the company's mobile phone division when the group was composed of five units.
Once dubbed as the two most outstanding contenders to take charge of the overall management of Korea's foremost company, Hwang had the honorable moniker of ``Mr. Chip'' compared to ``Mr. Mobile'' for Lee.
Both failed to achieve their potential in climbing up the corporate ladder to the ultimate job and left their divisions in 2008 ― Hwang now teaches at Seoul National University and Lee works as an advisor to the company.
Just as Hwang's Law lost its luster after his exit, so has WiBro, backed by Lee as the next-generation mobile standard, allowing people on the move to remain connected to the wireless Internet.
It is a homegrown platform whose development was spearheaded by Samsung and Lee with strong support from the tech-savvy Seoul administrations in the early and mid-2000s.
Samsung shelled out big bucks to develop the technology and domestic telecom operators spent more than 1 trillion won to build a network so that its commercial services started midway through 2006.
But it has failed to win the hearts and minds of end users here ― its base is still less than half a million customers ― and in that climate, some companies such as Posdata quit the business.
On an even more negative note, an increasing number of observers bet that an alternative technology called Long-Term Evolution (LTE) will shine as the fourth-generation mobile standard on the global scene.
Samsung still works on WiBro, known as mobile WiMax overseas, by exporting its devices to more than 20 countries worldwide. Without the avid WiBro supporter Lee, however, its efforts seem to half-hearted now.
``Under the stewardship of Lee, many at Samsung strongly believed that the future lay in WiBro. Now, such a strong belief seems to have disappeared. A mounting number of people look like trusting LTE more than WiBro,'' a Seoul analyst said.