The leaders are companies like Apple (chips and systems), Samsung (chips and systems), Google (operating system), Qualcomm (chips), ARM (chip designs), TSMC (foundry), and Globalfoundries (foundry).
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Still, Yun is hardly weaning Samsung off chips, so profits will continue to be volatile.
The most menacing of these is that posed by archrival Samsung, whose windfall profits from sales of memory chips and huge internal demand for advanced logic chips for Samsung-brand electronics products like smart phones give it sizeable advantages in the form of both financial firepower and in-house vertical integration.
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The deal also extends the existing patent cross-licensing deal between the two companies, and includes a NAND flash memory supply agreement for Samsung to provide chips to Seagate for solid-state drives and other products.
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Maxim pursues growth in the more competitive consumer electronics arena, providing chips for Samsung handsets.
But Samsung's memory chips weren't seen in iPhone 5s that have been disassembled, as they were in previous iPhone models.
It followed another major contract win to supply audio chips to Samsung.
In computer chips, Samsung Electronics is comfortably ahead of China for now.
If Apple is buying between 400 million and 500 million 4 gigabit NAND flash memory chips from Samsung, as reported in the trade press, that probably represents 40% of Apple's total orders, Handy figures.
The company is proving that manufacturing can be a platform for extensive, rapid innovation (Samsung makes its own chips as well as innovating in display technology, and is moving into lighting and medical technology) but it is also illustrating something else.
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Samsung also builds flash memory chips for Apple at the factory, according to the report.
The bets that Samsung Electronics placed on DRAM chips, liquid-crystal display screens and mobile telephones paid off handsomely.
As a result, he says, companies like Samsung and Intel have pioneered chips that are more reliable and easier to produce--innovations that have trickled into enterprise-level storage.
Analysts say TSMC is in a good position to boost its ties to Apple, which in the past has outsourced chips to rival Samsung but believed ready to move its business elsewhere.
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That means investing in a better UI, better apps for the TV and its companion screens, and it may even justify investing in better chips (as Samsung has done), to power those experiences.
At the trade show, Samsung's president of mobile chips, Stephen Woo, revealed a new design for cellphone processors that has eight processing cores, four powerful ones and four that are less powerful for simpler tasks.
Weak global demand for PC DRAM chips still weighed on Samsung's push for a recovery, although it responded to increased orders for server and mobile DRAM and hastened migration to the 30-nanometer and below process.
Apple is the largest customer for Samsung's component divisions, which make chips and displays for smartphones and tablets.
In 2012, mobile and information-technology products tallied two-thirds of Samsung's overall profit versus 14% for chips.
Unlike Korea's Samsung, which makes both consumer electronics and memory chips, Boise, Idaho-based Micron only makes chips.
SanDisk competes with other companies that make memory chips or storage devices like Micron and Samsung, Western Digital, Seagate and EMC.
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Korean makers LGand Samsung--making CDMA phones with Qualcomm's chips--began bombing the U.S. with far cheaper models, undercutting Qualcomm's handset business.
Currently, the top five companies that account for a third of stock holdings, he says, are non-Hyundai blue chips SK Telecom, power utility KEPCO, Samsung Electronics, Samsung Fire and Marine Insurance, and steel giant POSCO.
Apple is the largest customer for Samsung's component divisions, which make display screens and chips.
Recognized as one of the fastest growing global brands, Samsung Electronics is a leading producer of digital TVs, memory chips, mobile phones and TFT-LCDs.
Recognized as one of the fastest growing global brands, Samsung Electronics is a leading producer of digital TVs, semiconductor chips, mobile phones and TFT-LCDs.
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Samsung Electronics, the world's largest producer of memory chips, closed its wafer-fabrication plant and gave its employees one week off to enjoy sun and sand.
Apple has been taking more of the design of the chips inhouse over recent generations of them, leaving Samsung just as a fab rather than designer.
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Samsung owns its own manufacturing facilities where it builds screens, chips and other parts, allowing it to cut costs to make smartphones in a way that few other manufacturers can.
Mr. Lam said that could indicate a decision by Apple not to buy memory from Samsung, the world's biggest supplier of flash memory chips, amid continuing patent litigation between Apple and the chip maker's parent.
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