Samsung CEO says company will pursue deals as it struggles for growth

Samsung Electronics said on Wednesday it is looking at major deals to drive growth as it faced tough questions from shareholders after its failure to ride an artificial intelligence boom made it one of the worst-performing tech stocks last year.

The South Korean firm has been suffering from weak earnings and sagging share prices in recent quarters after falling behind rivals in advanced memory chips and contract chip manufacturing, which have enjoyed strong demand from AI projects.

Shareholders slammed management for poor stock performance and called for measures to revive stock prices at the meeting.

Samsung's co-CEO and head of its semiconductor business pledged to catch up with the high bandwidth memory (HBM) chip race and apologised for the company's poor stock performance.

"We were late in reading the market trends and we missed out on the early market as a result," Jun Young-hyun, Samsung co-CEO and head of its semiconductor business, said at the meeting.

Samsung, which has introduced a stock-based performance system to executives last year, is considering expanding the scheme to employees next year, as part of efforts to review its stock prices, co-CEO Han Jong-hee said.

Samsung shares were trading up 2.3%, compared with the benchmark KOSPI's 0.9% rise as of 12:27 pm (0327 GMT).

"The stock performance has been disappointing," a 65-year old shareholder who only gave his family name, Lee, told Reuters ahead of the meeting.

"Last year, the stock price was so bad that I even considered investing in US stocks instead," he said.

Shares in Samsung tumbled by nearly a third last year and hit a four-year low in November, while those of rival SK Hynix climbed 26%.

Samsung launched a share buyback plan worth 10 trillion won ($7.2 billion) in November.

MAJOR DEALS

Han told investors that 2025 would be a difficult year because of uncertainties surrounding economic policies in major economies and that Samsung would pursue "meaningful" mergers and acquisitions to address investor concerns about growth.

"There are some difficulties in doing semiconductor M&As due to regulatory issues and various national interests, but we're determined to produce some tangible results this year," he said.

In internal meetings, Samsung has acknowledged it has lost ground. This is particularly true in semiconductors, where it lags SK Hynix in HBM chips that Nvidia and others rely on for AI graphic processing units.

"Our technological edge has been compromised across all our businesses," said a transcript of a message from Chairman Jay Y. Lee given to an internal executive seminar that was seen by Reuters. "It's hard to see that efforts are being made to drive big innovation or tackle new challenges. There are only efforts to maintain a status quo rather than shaking things up."

In recent years, Samsung has also lost market share to TSMC in contract chip manufacturing and to Apple and Chinese rivals in smartphones.

Jun pledged to shareholders that 2025 would be "the year when we recover our fundamental competitiveness".

Still, Samsung faces bigger headwinds than rivals from further US restrictions on high-end chip exports to China, as the country has become Samsung's most important market thanks to chip stockpiling by Chinese firms.

Han said Samsung will flexibly respond to US President Donald Trump's tariffs with its global supply chain and manufacturing footprints, while looking at options for US investments.

The Trump administration is also reviewing chip projects that received billions in subsidies under a 2022 law meant to boost domestic semiconductor output. Major award recipients include Samsung, Intel, TSMC, Micron and SK Hynix.

Samsung is South Korea's most valuable company, with its market capitalisation of $235 billion accounting for 16% of the total value of the country's main bourse. Nearly 40% of investors in South Korean stocks own Samsung shares, according to market data.