Samsung Electronics Invests 37 Trillion Won in R&D Last Year, Marking All-Time High

Betting Everything on HBM Technology Leadership

It has been revealed that Samsung Electronics poured over 37 trillion won into research and development (R&D) expenses last year. As the semiconductor supercycle provides a tailwind for the company’s performance, this move is interpreted as a strategy to secure leadership in the 6th-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM4) market, which has emerged as the fiercest battleground of the year.

According to the 2025 business report disclosed by Samsung Electronics on March 10, the company’s total R&D expenditure last year amounted to 37.7548 trillion won. This is an increase of 7.8% compared to the previous year (35.0215 trillion won) and marks the largest annual amount ever. The ratio of R&D expenses to sales stood at 11.3%, similar to the previous year’s 11.6%. Based on these R&D investments, Samsung Electronics secured intellectual property including 10,639 domestic patents and 10,347 U.S. patents.

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With the HBM4 competition expected to intensify this year, it appears that Samsung Electronics has made significant investments in the development of related technologies. Applying a 10-nanometer-class 6th-generation (1c) DRAM process to HBM4, one step ahead of its competitors, Samsung Electronics attracted industry attention last month by becoming the world’s first to commence mass production and shipment of HBM4. This product is slated to be installed in Nvidia’s next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) chip, “Vera Rubin.”

Samsung Electronics stated, “For DRAM, we plan to proactively expand supply of HBM4 with competitive performance targeting the new GPU and custom semiconductor (ASIC) markets in AI, actively responding to customer demand. We will also continue to increase the share of AI-related products such as high-capacity DDR5, SOCAMM2, and GDDR7.”

Last year, Samsung Electronics was the industry’s first to successfully mass-produce 24Gb GDDR7 DRAM and 10-nanometer-class 6th-generation server DRAM. In the non-memory sector, the foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing) division is currently developing with the aim of mass-producing 2-nanometer (nm) process chips in the second half of this year.The System LSI division focused on enhancing the performance of the mobile application processor (AP) “Exynos 2600” last year, increasing the CPU’s computational performance by up to 39% compared to its predecessor, the Exynos 2500.

Meanwhile, the global market share of Samsung Electronics’ main products was found to have generally increased last year. The global market share for TVs rose from 28.3% to 29.1% compared to the previous year, and for smartphones, from 18.3% to 19.2%. However, the DRAM market share shrank from 41.5% to 34% last year, due to sluggish results for HBM3E (5th generation).

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