Samsung: The 1983 Tokyo Declaration, Apple Chip Deals and an AI Pay Strike

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Samsung Electric Industries was formed in Suwon in 1969 under a group that once traded fertilizer and sweeteners, and it had no basic technology of its own. It learned to build black and white TVs, calculators and refrigerators through joint ventures with Sanyo and NEC, and public anger over the Japanese partnerships forced a promise to export everything those ventures made. In 1974 it bought the struggling Korea Semiconductor, and in 1983 founder Lee Byung-chul issued the Tokyo Declaration committing Samsung to DRAM memory. By licensing designs from Micron and Sharp and building fabs before it fully understood them, Samsung closed an estimated 10-year technology gap by 1987.

Its first mobile phone in 1988 flopped, and in the early 1990s Motorola held over 60% of South Korea's phone market to Samsung's 10%. Samsung turned to selling top components to other brands and declared 1996 the Year of Design Revolution. It kept growing through the 1997 Asian financial crisis, passed Sony as a brand in 2005, Motorola in phones in 2007 and Hewlett-Packard in sales in 2009, all while supplying memory to Apple and fighting it in patent suits in 2011 and 2012. In 2024 the National Samsung Electronics Union struck for a 15% profit share, and high bandwidth memory demand for AI drove a $36.15 billion operating profit in the first quarter of 2026.

• During the 1997 crisis, 16 of South Korea's 30 largest companies collapsed while Samsung kept growing its earnings.
• Galaxy phones catching fire in 2016 forced a global recall and led to bans on bringing them onto flights.
• Taiwan fined Samsung for astroturfing after it covertly funded negative online commentary about competitors.
• U.S. and EU regulators fined Samsung in 2009 and 2010 over memory chip and LCD price-fixing cartels, though it avoided the heaviest EU penalty by informing on the cartel.
• The advocacy group SHARPS fought for years over leukemia and other cancers among chip plant workers before an apology and compensation framework were settled in 2018.