Compared to Q1 2019, Samsung's chip production was 57.4 percent higher in Q1 2020. The company's quarterly report showed that the South Korean tech giant ramped up DRAM and NAND flash chips during the quarter despite the COVID-19 outbreak. As a result, the company improved its market share in the DRAM market during the first quarter of this year.
Samsung is the world's largest memory chip maker, and its chip factory operation rate was 100 percent in the January-March 2020 quarter. The company produced 277.4 billion units of semiconductors in the first quarter of 2020, up from 176.2 billion units in the same quarter last year. It improved the efficiency of its chip manufacturing process.
This ramp-up in chip production was to cater to the growing demand for DRAM and storage chips for data centers and servers. Since the COVID-19 crisis, people have been working, learning, and getting entertained from home, and cloud servers and data centers support all of these activities. Robust chip sales during the quarter helped the company in achieving higher profits.
Samsung's mobile phone and display production plunged, though, during the quarter as people are spending less on high-ticket items like smartphones and TVs as the economic crisis looms large. The South Korean firm manufactured 58.7 million smartphones and 1.45 million displays, down 34.4 percent and 35.5 percent from Q1 2019, respectively.
The chip giant also announced the industry's first 10nm EUV DRAM chips, 160-layer NAND flash memory chips, and third-generation HBM2E Flashbolt memory chips. Samsung also announced its new-generation SSD with support for PCIe Gen 4 and E1.S form factor last week.
