Time for Samsung’s Most Boring Business to Shine

Time for Samsung’s Most Boring Business to Shine

Compared to foldable smartphones and curved ultra-high definition televisions, semiconductors are kind of dull. After all, they don’t even have a power button. Taken from the broad menu of chips now in use, memory is the most mundane of all. They’re the breadsticks of electronics.

At Samsung Electronics Co., though, memory chips have the potential to make a lot of dough. The South Korean giant is the global leader in the two main types — DRAM and NAND — and the world is about to get very hungry for both. This appetite doesn’t come a moment too soon, and management needs to do all it can to leverage the opportunity.

Samsung on Thursday posted an impressive 45% jump in operating profit for the first quarter from an 18% increase in overall revenue. Yet its chip division was a huge laggard. Memory sales climbed a dull 10% and earnings at the semiconductor unit dropped. As a result, the division’s contribution to total profit, at 35.9%, was the lowest in almost five years. By comparison, the mobile phone unit accounted for 46.8%.

A confluence of factors explain this weakness, including a power outage in Texas that hit non-memory chip manufacturing and a ramp-up in new