Samsung is a South Korean multinational conglomerate, founded in 1938 as a trading company, based in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the Samsung brand.
Notably, Samsung brands include Samsung Electronics (the world’s largest information technology company, consumer electronics maker and chipmaker measured by 2017 revenues), Samsung Heavy Industries (shipbuilding), and Samsung Engineering (Construction engineering, not hardware nor software). Samsung even works in Life Insurance and runs the oldest theme park in South Korea.1
Samsung started to rise as an international corporation in the 1990s. The company became the world’s largest producer of memory chips in 1992 and is the world’s second-largest chipmaker after Intel.2 In 1995, it created its first liquid-crystal display screen and ten years later, Samsung grew to be the world’s largest manufacturer of liquid-crystal display panels. Sony, which had not invested in large-size TFT-LCDs, contacted Samsung to cooperate, and, in 2006, S-LCD was established as a joint venture between Samsung and Sony in order to provide a stable supply of LCD panels for both manufacturers.3
In first quarter of 2012, Samsung Electronics became the world’s largest mobile phone maker by unit sales, overtaking Nokia, which had been the market leader since 1998.4 In 2015, Samsung has been granted more U.S. patents than any other company – including IBM, Google, Sony, Microsoft, and Apple.5
Anonymous on March 10, 2020