The South Korean electronics group Samsung Electronics became the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer last year, pushing America's Intel into second place.

For the third time in the past five years, Samsung is leading the computer chips and memory components business after Intel had dominated the market for decades.

The changing of the guard symbolizes how much the global semiconductor market has shifted to Asia.

At the same time, governments in America and Europe are courting investments from the leading Asian semiconductor companies in order to achieve more security of supply for microchips in the trade conflict between China and the West.

Patrick Welter

Correspondent for business and politics in Japan based in Tokyo.

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Samsung predicted that semiconductor demand will continue to grow this year.

Companies would continue to increase their investments in information technology.

At the same time, the expansion of 5G data networks is driving demand.

However, the largest South Korean company in terms of market capitalization warned of the risks of the pandemic and in the supply chains.

Given the risks, Samsung didn't provide guidance for the full year.

The own investment planning is still being worked out, it said.

Like other semiconductor manufacturers, the South Koreans have drastically increased their investments in recent years to meet the shortage of supply.

Samsung invested 48.2 trillion won last year, including 43.6 trillion won in semiconductor production.

Samsung increases its profit by 51 percent

The company reported an 18 percent increase in sales for 2021 to 279.6 trillion won (206 billion euros) on Thursday.

In the semiconductor division, sales rose even more, by 29 percent to 94.16 trillion won.

Converted into the American currency, that is 82 billion dollars.

Intel had presented annual sales of $75 billion the day before.

Apparently, the American company was not able to take advantage of the rapidly increasing demand for semiconductors during the pandemic last year as well as the South Korean electronics giant.

According to a study by the market research institute Gartner, the South Korean manufacturer SK Hynix is ​​in third place, but only half the size of Samsung.

Samsung had already moved ahead of Intel in the ranking in 2017 and 2018.

At that time, the largest manufacturer of electronic memory chips benefited above all from a sharp increase in the price of memory chips.

Samsung's renewed top position is now also based on the fact that the South Koreans are trying to put their semiconductor business on a broader footing.

In the past two years of the pandemic, logic chips and external production (foundry) contributed almost a quarter of sales of semiconductors.

Samsung competes primarily with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation for custom manufacturing.

For the full year, Samsung reported a profit of 39.9 trillion won (29.5 billion euros), up 51 percent year-on-year.

Operating profit rose 41 percent to 51.6 trillion won.

As already reported, Samsung ended 2021 with a record quarter in terms of sales.

The group's business, which offers everything from refrigerators and televisions to cell phones, is increasingly being dominated in profit by electronic components.

Last year, semiconductors contributed 34 percent to sales but 57 percent to operating profit.

The area of ​​mobile devices with smartphones still leads in sales, but only contributed 26 percent to the operating surplus last year.

A decade ago, the cell phone business dominated Samsung Electronics' balance sheet.

On February 9th, the company will introduce a new top of its range of Galaxy phones.