Samsung is reportedly having some issues with its foundry business at home. According to a Business Korea report, Samsung has recently discovered defects in its foundry products which may lead to considerable financial losses. The defects were reportedly caused by contaminated 8-inch wafer line equipment at the Giheung plant.
The publication cites an unnamed Samsung Electronics official who acknowledged the issue and said that the problem has been addressed. On the other hand, the official also added that this unfortunate set of events may have cost Samsung billions of won (millions of US dollars).
Samsung might underestimate the damage
While it's unclear exactly what foundry products were contaminated, Samsung may still be underestimating the damage, at least according to unnamed industry insiders cited by Business Korea. They claim that “the loss can be much larger than the company's estimate.”
It's also unclear if the products that were contaminated were being manufactured for Samsung's own purposes or other clients. The company does manufacture chipsets for a fairly large number of companies including Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.
This event could throw a wrench into Samsung's plans to increase its chipset foundry market share and, as it could hurt its reputation, it may slow down the company's progress for the foreseeable future. Therefore the damage could be higher in the long run.
Whatever the outcome may be in the wake of these recent happenings, Samsung is betting big on its foundry business – regardless of its decision to abandon its custom CPU cores for the Exynos package – and the company's roadmap includes large investments in chipset R&D by 2030.
