Monday, January 17, 2005
Samsung Electronics said it would boost spending on advanced LCD and fab in 2005 despite its profit dipped in the 4th quarter to $1.7 billion, from $2.4 billion in the third quarter.
The company's best sales performer was its LCD division, followed by semiconductors. Operating profits in both divisions increased 111 percent and 107 percent, respectively. But by the fourth quarter, operating margins took a hit in LCDs (down to 0.4 percent) and in its telecom unit (3 percent).
Despite this, the company will spend 10 trillion won on capital investments, a 34 percent increase over 2004. About $5.7 billion will go to its system LSI and memory plants, with the amount being spent on system LSI representing a 107 percent increase over last year. Memory investment will decline 6 percent, but the company will still increase bit shipments by 95 percent.
Samsung will also spend $5.1 billion on R&D, up 13 percent from last year. In its outlook for this year, Samsung said DRAM prices will decline slightly because of a 0.6 percent oversupply. It predicted the industry transition to DDR2 on 90-nm processes would delay the ramp-up of 300-mm fabs, thereby reducing supply growth. For NAND flash, it expects a strong demand increase as memory per system increases in current applications, like memory cards and MP3 players, and as new applications, such as portable media players, increase in popularity.
By: DocMemory
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