By Hyunjoo Jin and Heekyong Yang
SUWON, South Korea (Reuters) -Samsung Electronics said on Wednesday it is looking at major deals to drive growth as it faced tough questions from shareholders after its failure to ride an artificial intelligence boom made it one of the worst-performing tech stocks last year.
The South Korean firm has been suffering from weak earnings and sagging share prices in recent quarters after falling behind rivals in advanced memory chips and contract chip manufacturing, which have enjoyed strong demand from AI projects.
Shareholders slammed management for poor stock performance and called for measures to revive stock prices at the meeting.
Samsung’s co-CEO and head of its semiconductor business pledged to catch up with the high bandwidth memory (HBM) chip race and apologised for the company’s poor stock performance.
“We were late in reading the market trends and we missed out on the early market as a result,” Jun Young-hyun, Samsung co-CEO and head of its semiconductor business, said at the meeting.
Samsung, which has introduced a stock-based performance system to executives last year, is considering expanding the scheme to employees next year, as part of efforts to review its stock prices, co-CEO Han Jong-hee said.
Samsung shares were trading up 2.3%, compared with the benchmark KOSPI’s 0.9% rise as of 12:27 p.m. (0327 GMT).
“The stock performance has been disappointing,” a 65-year old shareholder who only gave his family name, Lee, told Reuters ahead of the meeting.
“Last year, the stock price was so bad that I even considered investing in U.S. stocks instead,” he said.
Shares in Samsung tumbled by nearly a third last year and hit a four-year low in November, while those of rival SK Hynix climbed 26%.
Samsung launched a share buyback plan worth 10 trillion won ($7.2 billion) in November.
MAJOR DEALS
Han told investors that 2025 would be a difficult year because of uncertainties surrounding economic policies in major economies and that Samsung would pursue “meaningful” mergers and acquisitions to address investor concerns about growth.
“There are some difficulties in doing semiconductor M&As due to regulatory issues and various national interests, but we’re determined to produce some tangible results this year,” he said.
In internal meetings, Samsung has acknowledged it has lost ground. This is particularly true in semiconductors, where it lags SK Hynix in HBM chips that Nvidia and others rely on for AI graphic processing units.
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