[Why Korea 10] How Samsung and SK Hynix Conquered the Memory Chip Market?

In the previous episode, we explored why the world depends on Korea's memory semiconductors in the age of AI.

That naturally led to another question.

How did these two companies become the world's memory giants?

There's no way to fit all of their "blood, sweat, and tears" into a single article, but I did my best to trace the most fascinating chapters of their journey.

Samsung Electronics and SK hynix.

Their paths could not have been more different.

Yet both companies faced moments when everything seemed lost—and both eventually rose to the very top of the global semiconductor industry.

Samsung Electronics: The Tokyo Declaration That Changed Everything

In March 1982, Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul traveled to the United States to receive an honorary doctorate from Boston University.

Afterward, he visited Silicon Valley, touring semiconductor facilities operated by IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

At the time, there were barely 1,000 personal computers in all of South Korea.

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, computers were already transforming the way businesses operated.

That visit convinced him that the future had already begun.

Upon returning to Korea, Lee immediately ordered a feasibility study on the semiconductor business.

Several months later, the report arrived with an unexpected conclusion.

The global leader in memory semiconductors wasn't the United States anymore—it was Japan.

Many people would have concluded that Korea was already too late.

Lee reached the opposite conclusion.

"If Japan can do it, so can we."

In February 1983, while staying at a hotel in Tokyo where he often made major business decisions, Lee finalized one of the boldest choices of his life.

He called Korea and delivered a simple message:

"No matter what anyone says, Samsung will enter the semiconductor business."

At the time, the decision looked almost reckless.

Korea had virtually no experience producing advanced semiconductors.

Critics predicted the project would fail within three years.

Some even mocked Samsung, asking how a company that struggled to compete in televisions could possibly survive in one of the world's most demanding industries.

Lee didn't wait for the criticism to fade.

Construction of Samsung's semiconductor plant began almost immediately.

Less than a year later, Samsung successfully developed a 64K DRAM chip, becoming only the third company in the world to achieve the milestone after the United States and Japan.

It was more than just another product.

It proved that Korea could compete at the highest level of semiconductor technology.

Samsung never looked back.

In 1992, it developed the world's first 64M DRAM, overtaking the Japanese companies that had dominated the industry for years.

One year later, Samsung became the world's No. 1 memory semiconductor company—a position it has maintained for more than three decades.

But the AI era introduced a new race.

In HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), the memory technology powering modern AI, Samsung would soon find itself facing an unexpected challenger.

SK hynix: From Near Collapse to the Most Valuable Company in Korea

If Samsung's story is about bold ambition, SK hynix is a story of survival.

The company wasn't originally called SK hynix.

It began as Hyundai Electronics.

In the early 2000s, the company faced a devastating crisis.

A government-led restructuring forced Hyundai Electronics to acquire LG Semicon, leaving it burdened with enormous debt.

At nearly the same time, internal conflicts within the Hyundai Group caused the conglomerate to split apart.

When the global semiconductor market entered a downturn in 2000 and 2001, debt ballooned to nearly 10 trillion won, eventually pushing the company into creditor control.

Its stock price fell so low that it earned the nickname "the penny stock."

In 2002, management even proposed selling the company to Micron Technology for roughly 4 trillion won.

At the time, more people believed selling the company was the only realistic option than surviving independently.

The sale ultimately fell through.

But for nearly a decade afterward, the company remained trapped in uncertainty, surviving multiple failed acquisition attempts without a clear owner.

Everything changed in 2012.

SK Group—best known for telecommunications and energy—acquired the struggling semiconductor company.

Many questioned the decision.

Why would a telecom company buy a semiconductor manufacturer?

SK Chairman Chey Tae-won believed the future of the group depended on creating a new engine of growth.

Semiconductors, he believed, would become that future.

Even then, success didn't come easily.

SK hynix introduced the world's first commercial HBM together with AMD in 2014.

However, technical difficulties during the second generation of HBM left the company trailing Samsung.

Inside the company, executives seriously debated whether HBM development should be abandoned altogether.

One executive later told Reuters that, by 2019, HBM had become a headache that looked almost worthless.

Demand from both NVIDIA and cryptocurrency mining companies had collapsed, leaving billions of won invested in production facilities sitting idle.

Instead of walking away, SK hynix made a different choice.

It invested even more.

Then, only a few years later, generative AI changed everything.

Demand for NVIDIA's AI accelerators exploded, and HBM suddenly became one of the most important components in the entire AI industry.

Because SK hynix had continued investing when few others believed in the technology, it was ready before almost anyone else.

After posting an operating loss of more than 7 trillion won in 2023 during the memory downturn, the company recorded its highest operating profit ever just one year later.

In June 2026, SK hynix surpassed Samsung Electronics in market capitalization for the first time.

The same company once dismissed as a penny stock had become Korea's most valuable company—thanks largely to the technology that had once been considered its biggest problem.

Yet this story still isn't over.

Samsung has rapidly regained ground with its newest HBM products, and the competition between the two companies continues today.

So... Why Korea?

These two companies faced very different crises.

One was built on a bold leap into an industry nobody believed Korea could master.

The other survived years of uncertainty when many believed it would disappear.

Yet both arrived at the same destination.

Today, they stand at the center of one of the world's most important technologies.

Perhaps that's no coincidence.

Maybe today's Korean semiconductor industry wasn't built simply on technology.

Maybe it was built on the decisions people made when giving up would have been the easier choice.

Curious about Korea?

So am I.

Let's keep growing together. - Super Garden Korea

[Why Korea 12] How Korea's 'Dying' Shipyards Roared Back?

My younger brother lives in Ulsan. Ulsan was once the city with the highest average income in all of Korea. That was when shipbuilding, automobiles, and petrochemicals were all running at full speed at the same time. Then shipbuilding began to crack, and the mood shifted. Foreclosure listings flooded the market, and the streets grew quiet. These days, my sibling says things seem to be slowly coming back. The worst is probably over. But it's still hard to say the local economy has truly recovered. The news talks about Korea's shipbuilding revival. But the temperature on the ground rises more slowly than the headlines suggest. So how did the crisis begin — and how did the industry get to where it is today? The End of the Boom: Korea's Shipbuilding Collapse (2008–2016) In the early 2000s, Korea was the world's number one shipbuilder. A significant share of the world's vessels were being built in shipyards in Geoje, Ulsan, and Mokpo. Order backlogs were overflowi...

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