"If Delayed Further, They'll Fall Behind" Samsung Now Hires 'M&A Expert,' Why?

Mako Chisari

[Asia Economy New York=Special Correspondent Joselgina, Reporter Kim Jinho] Samsung Electronics' consecutive recruitment of advanced industry and merger and acquisition (M&A) experts is interpreted as an inevitable choice to survive the increasingly intense global semiconductor hegemony competition. As competing companies attract global talent with powerful capital, the recruitment of experts has become so fierce that the head of the company is directly involved. In particular, with this recruitment, Samsung's M&A, which had been halted since the acquisition of Harman in 2016 due to Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong's judicial risks, is expected to resume in earnest.

According to Bloomberg and industry sources on the 28th, Marco Chisari, a senior recruit from Bank of America (BoA) Merrill Lynch, is an investment expert in the semiconductor industry who has successfully completed several M&As, including Infineon's acquisition of Cypress (worth $10 billion) and AMS's acquisition of Osram (worth $4.6 billion).

Before joining Merrill Lynch, Chisari served as an executive director at Credit Suisse in the U.S. from 2016 to 2018, handling M&As of technology companies. Previously, he advised on large-scale deals such as Analog Devices' acquisition of Linear Technology (worth $14.7 billion), Broadcom's acquisition of Brocade (worth $5.6 billion), and Qualcomm's attempted acquisition of NXP.

In particular, this recruitment is also seen as Samsung Electronics' declaration of aggressive M&A centered on the semiconductor sector in the future. For Samsung Electronics, which had stopped external talent recruitment due to Vice Chairman Lee's judicial risks, the recent emergence of a 'crisis theory' in the semiconductor and smartphone sectors has been interpreted as a need to put more effort into recruiting experts.

Earlier this month, Samsung Electronics recruited Robert Wisniewski, a supercomputer expert from Intel, as a new vice president. Vice President Wisniewski leads the U.S. System Architecture Research Lab under Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology. He worked at IBM for about 15 years from 1997 to 2012, then moved to Intel, where he was responsible for supercomputing and software design. He was involved in the Aurora project, developing an exaflop-level (floating-point operations reaching 10^18 per second) supercomputer in collaboration with the Argonne National Laboratory under the U.S. Department of Energy.

Before the increase in judicial risks, Samsung Electronics had put great effort into talent recruitment to the extent that Vice Chairman Lee personally got involved. In 2018, they brought Daniel Lee, an authority in artificial intelligence (AI) robotics and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to Samsung Research, and the following year, recruited Harvard University professor Woo Koo-yeon as a fellow. In June 2020, they hired Sebastian Seung, an AI expert and Princeton University professor, as the head of Samsung Research.

As industrial convergence accelerates, the market is flooded with opinions that Samsung Electronics must continuously attract new brains to overcome its limitations. Since the development of cutting-edge technology and all processes to implement it ultimately depend on 'people,' talent recruitment directly translates into competitiveness.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.