Fire at competitor
A fire at Samsung’s main chip competitor, Chinese SK Hynix, is the
source of this surge: with fewer chips on the market,
the price spiked, helping Samsung to bring in a lot of money through the sale of
DRAM memory for mobile appliances.
Smartphone sales also helped Samsung’s record quarter, as its 4.6 billion euro
profit far outweighed analysts’ expectations. Samsung sold 10 % more smartphones in the third quarter, leading to a total of some 40
million smartphones sold for the first part of 2013.
Samsung had to take some bad news as well, as it is forced to pay competitor HTC a 245,000 euro fine for writing
negative fake reviews. The Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission has imposed the fine onto Samsung for this behaviour, thinking it proven the South Korean company paid students to portray their competitors
badly.
(translated by Gary Peeters)
