Samsung pours cold water on foundry split suggestion

Despite massive losses, Samsung won’t spin out its foundry and logic chip design activities, the firm’s chairperson Jay Y. Lee told Reuters. On the contrary, “we’re hungry to grow the business. Not interested in spinning them off,” he said.

Even with investing large sums of money, Samsung has reportedly been struggling to sign external customers for its contract semiconductor manufacturing unit. This has prompted analysts, even from Samsung’s own investment arm, to float the idea of spinning out the foundry business. Such a move would gain the trust of fabless firms that compete with Samsung in electronics markets.

Without financial support from the conglomerate, however, the spin-out would be left extremely vulnerable. Especially so since the Koreans have reportedly been struggling with the yields of their leading-edge manufacturing processes. Partly as a result of that, and possibly because of a lack of customers as well, Samsung pushed back production at its new fab in Taylor, Texas, by two years.