Samsung Electronics nominates chip execs as new board members

SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics on Tuesday nominated its chip business chief Jun Young-hyun and Chief Technology Officer Song Jai-hyuk to join its board, as the tech giant looks to boost competitiveness in its struggling semiconductor business.  

 

The South Korean company also said in a regulatory filing it had nominated Seoul National University Professor Lee Hyuk-jae as an outside director. Lee, a chip expert, is head of Seoul National University’s semiconductor research centre.

 

With two chip executives and one semiconductor academic  nominated to the board, Samsung is looking to strengthen its focus on chips at the top level of the company. 

 

Samsung Electronics has been scrambling to restore its competitiveness in the chip business, after it lost market leadership in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in Nvidia’s AI graphics processing units (GPUs) to domestic rival SK Hynix. 

 

Samsung said the new board nominations would be voted on at a shareholders’ meeting slated for March 19. 

 

(Reporting by Joyce Lee and Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Ed Davies)