Samsung announces support for five startups from its C-Lab program

Samsung introduced its in-house idea incubation program C-Lab in December 2012. Since 2015, the company also started supporting successful C-Lab projects and helped them in launching as startups under the C-Lab spin-off policy. Today, the company has announced support for five new startups as a part of its C-Lab Inside program.

The South Korean firm said that it will support Blockbuster, Haxby, Hyler, RootSensor, and SunnyFive. The C-Lab spin-off program provides startups with investment and business consulting that is needed for their growth. Samsung also provides a five-year window within which its employees who launch startups can return to their jobs if their startups are unsuccessful. This gives them added confidence to pursue their entrepreneurial projects without risking their careers.

Blockbuster is a video editing app that allows adding computer graphics and 3D effects to videos on smartphones. It uses a patented Blockbuster algorithm to generate realistic 3D effects by converting 2D scenes to 3D layers. Haxby is an education startup that records incorrect answers from workbooks and uses AI to recommend customized worksheets to improve a user’s learning performance.

Hyler is a smart highlighter that converts analog text into digital and transfers them to smartphones. Users can easily collect information, digitize text, and interact with it using the Hyler app. RootSensor is a new type of sensor that can detect UV exposure and provide information on skin condition and vitamin D production. It can be used in wearables, smart cars, and smart buildings.

SunnyFive is probably the most interesting startup among the group. It makes window-shaped lighting devices that produce artificial sunlight. It is quite useful in places where there isn’t enough access to sunlight, helping people to synthesize Vitamin D while they’re indoors or low-lit places. These devices provide a full spectrum of light produced by the sun’s natural passage through the sky during the day. Brightness and color adjustments can also be done using an app.

163 Samsung employees have created 45 startups so far since the inception of the C-Lab program. These companies have raised over $45 million over the years and their value has more than tripled ever since they were spun-off as startups. You can read all about them here.

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Samsung heir visits chip factory in China to assess expansion plan

Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong, who gave a historic apology and promised to end Samsung’s royal line a few weeks ago, visited the company’s chip factory in China. The company said that the purpose of the visit was to assess the plant’s expansion plan following the country’s economic reopening amid COVID-19 slowdown.

This is Lee’s first international business trip since he visited Brazil in January. He inspected Samsung’s chip factory in Xi’an, China, and encouraged workers there to overcome the fallout from the pandemic. He said, “To secure new growth engines, we need to be preemptive and be prepared for forthcoming changes. We have no time, and we cannot lose this moment.”

According to sources, Lee went through a virus test after his landing in China. China and South Korea started to operate on a fast-track entry system for business professionals, which allows exempts them from the 14-day mandatory isolation rule that is applicable for other travelers. This step has been taken to help minimize the economic fallout due to the deadly virus and entry curbs.

Samsung’s Xi’an plant is its only memory chip factory outside of South Korea. The South Korean firm had announced last year that it would invest an additional $8 billion to expand the plant. It also sent around 200 engineers last month for the expansion of the second plant in Xi’an. Chip production at the expanded plant should begin anytime soon.

The company’s Xi’an chip plant first started production in 2014, and then Samsung decided in 2017 that it will expand the plant after it signed the agreement with the Shaanxi provincial government.

Although the South Korean firm dethroned Intel in 2017 to take the top spot in the semiconductor business, it lost to Intel again in Q4 2020. However, Samsung has come up with a decade-long plan, consisting of $115 billion investment for logic chip development and production.

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Samsung produced 57 percent more semiconductor chips during Q1 2020

Compared to Q1 2019, Samsung’s chip production was 57.4 percent higher in Q1 2020. The company’s quarterly report showed that the South Korean tech giant ramped up DRAM and NAND flash chips during the quarter despite the COVID-19 outbreak. As a result, the company improved its market share in the DRAM market during the first quarter of this year.

Samsung is the world’s largest memory chip maker, and its chip factory operation rate was 100 percent in the January-March 2020 quarter. The company produced 277.4 billion units of semiconductors in the first quarter of 2020, up from 176.2 billion units in the same quarter last year. It improved the efficiency of its chip manufacturing process.

This ramp-up in chip production was to cater to the growing demand for DRAM and storage chips for data centers and servers. Since the COVID-19 crisis, people have been working, learning, and getting entertained from home, and cloud servers and data centers support all of these activities. Robust chip sales during the quarter helped the company in achieving higher profits.

Samsung’s mobile phone and display production plunged, though, during the quarter as people are spending less on high-ticket items like smartphones and TVs as the economic crisis looms large. The South Korean firm manufactured 58.7 million smartphones and 1.45 million displays, down 34.4 percent and 35.5 percent from Q1 2019, respectively.

The chip giant also announced the industry’s first 10nm EUV DRAM chips, 160-layer NAND flash memory chips, and third-generation HBM2E Flashbolt memory chips. Samsung also announced its new-generation SSD with support for PCIe Gen 4 and E1.S form factor last week.

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