Samsung Overtakes Micron to Rank No. 1 in Global Automotive Memory Market

Samsung Electronics Becomes No. 1 in Automotive Memory

Market Share Reaches 40% Last Year

Samsung Electronics Co. overtook Micron Technology Inc. to become the world’s largest supplier in the automotive memory semiconductor market for the first time.

An S&P Global Mobility report released on May 31 showed Samsung held a 40% share of the automotive memory market last year, up 5 percentage points from 35% a year earlier. Micron, the previous leader, fell to second place as its share slipped to 36% from 40% over the same period.

The gain came as Samsung sharply expanded its presence in China, a fast-growing market, beyond traditional auto markets in Europe, South Korea and Japan. It also benefited from surging demand for high-capacity, high-performance memory as autonomous driving systems spread and in-vehicle infotainment, or IVI, systems grow more sophisticated. Samsung’s advanced products, including low-power DRAM such as LPDDR and Universal Flash Storage, or UFS, won support from global customers.

Automotive memory had long been classified as a relatively low-value segment of the memory industry because product replacement cycles typically run seven to eight years and the market historically required less advanced technology. Carmakers also put durability and stability ahead of performance and maintained conservative supply-chain practices, creating high barriers to entry for new suppliers.

Samsung entered the high-performance infotainment and autonomous-driving vehicle chip market in earnest in 2015 with low-power memory solutions such as LPDDR and UFS. It later stepped up its push into the global premium market centered on autonomous driving by applying automotive solid-state drives, or SSDs, and graphics DRAM, or GDDR, to mass-produced vehicles ahead of rivals. Samsung posted average annual revenue growth of more than 40% in the automotive memory market from 2020 to 2025, according to the report.

Samsung plans to strengthen its lead with a broader lineup that includes high-performance DRAM products such as LPDDR5X and LPDDR5, as well as SSDs that meet the AEC-Q100 automotive quality standard.

Kim Chae-yeon, Hankyung.com reporter

why29@hankyung.com