http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-samsungs-intends-to-tackle-2015/

Semiconductor boom

Samsung's semiconductor arm posted a yearly profit of 8.78 trillion won for 2014, a rise of 1.89 trillion won from the previous year. The company, as well as South Korean market watchers, expect that it will retain or grow the business further this year, with high demand for its memory chips in mobile and servers.

"For 2015, year-on-year DRAM bit growth of the market is expected to be mid-20 percent. Our company's DRAM growth rate will exceed that of the market," said Yi. "[In NAND] the bit-growth of the market will be late-30 percent. [Samsung's] NAND flash growth rate will exceed that of the market."

Jeeho Baek, senior vice president of Samsung's memory marketing team, expects higher uptake for its LPDDR4 memory, which the company touted as the world's first.

"LPDDR4 will account for 15 to 20 percent [of overall Samsung's mobile memory chip production]. It will be a must-have in flagship products [of both Samsung and client's]," he said.

Baek expects that demand will be "steadied" going forward for LPDDR4. The company, which was first to start mass production for 3D V-NANDs, plans to balance the production ratio of 3D V-NANDs and 2D NANDs. The move is likely to control cost, as 3D V-NANDs are yet to go as low as 2D NANDs due to shortness of supply in the market.

"In SSDs, for low-capacity products, we believe 2D is still needed, so up to this year, we plan to vary the production ratio of 2D and 3D products," said the executive.

Besides memory, Samsung has been faring quite poorly in processors and contract production due to low demand for its Exynos system-on-a-chip (SoC) and having production for Apple's A series going to rival TSMC of Taiwan.

Joe Hur, vice president of Samsung's System LSI business, its logic chip-making division, said revenue is rising while profitability is expected to improve for the year. Samsung has already secured clients such as Qualcomm and Apple for foundry for 20-nanometre processes, as well as its touted 14-nanometre FinFet process, company insiders say. Next-generation chips from clients are widely expected to go for the latter process.