A grocery trader in 1938. The world's largest memory-chip maker in 2026. Samsung is the rare company you meet in your pocket, on your wall, and inside the machines that run the internet.
Most people know Samsung as the company that makes the phone in their hand or the television on their wall. That is true, and it is only half the picture. Inside Samsung Electronics live two very different businesses. One sells finished goods you can hold - Galaxy smartphones, Neo QLED TVs, Bespoke refrigerators. The other sells the parts that go inside almost everything else: memory chips, displays, and processors, shipped by the billion to customers that include Samsung's own competitors.
That duality is the key to understanding the company. When you buy a rival's phone, there is a real chance the memory or the screen came from Samsung. The company sits both on the shelf and underneath it. In 2026, the underneath part is where the money is: a global surge in demand for AI memory - particularly High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM - pushed Samsung to an all-time record quarterly revenue of roughly KRW 133.9 trillion in the first quarter, with semiconductors, not smartphones, doing the heavy lifting.
The origin story is improbable. Samsung was founded on March 1, 1938, by Lee Byung-chul as a trading company in Taegu, Korea, dealing in dried fish, noodles, and local produce. The name means "three stars" in Korean - a signal of something big and lasting. Electronics did not enter the story until three decades later. Samsung Electronics was formally established on January 13, 1969, and its first product, a black-and-white television, shipped in November 1970. From that single TV set to HBM stacks feeding AI supercomputers is a distance most companies never travel.
Samsung organizes itself around two pillars. The Device eXperience (DX) division covers the consumer-facing catalog: mobile phones and tablets, wearables like the Galaxy Watch and Galaxy Ring, televisions and monitors, and a deep bench of home appliances. The Device Solutions (DS) division runs the component businesses: memory (DRAM and NAND flash), a foundry that manufactures chips on contract, and System LSI, which designs Exynos processors and image sensors. Together they make Samsung one of the largest technology companies on earth by revenue.
The company's guiding line is short - "Inspire the World, Create the Future" - and its values lean heavily on engineering, scale, and vertical integration. Samsung would rather make its own screen, its own chip, and its own battery than buy them. That instinct looks old-fashioned until a supply chain breaks, at which point the company that controls its own parts is the one still shipping.
Bars indicate relative market leadership, not exact percentages. Shares vary by quarter and source.
Billions of consumers buy Galaxy phones, TVs, and appliances across nearly every country. On the other side of the ledger, enterprise and OEM customers - phone makers, data-center operators, automakers, and AI chip designers - buy Samsung's memory, displays, and foundry capacity. It is one of the few brands that sells to both a shopper and a supply chain.
For consumers: reliable, feature-rich devices at a range of price points, with the AI features increasingly built in on-device. For industry: a dependable, high-volume source of the memory and display components that modern computing runs on. As AI workloads explode, Samsung's HBM addresses one of the tightest bottlenecks in the market - memory bandwidth.
Plenty of companies make phones. Plenty make chips. Very few do both at global scale, and that breadth is Samsung's defining trait. Apple designs beautiful devices but outsources most manufacturing. TSMC dominates advanced foundry work but makes no consumer gadgets. Samsung fights on both fronts at once - competing with Apple and Xiaomi in phones, with TSMC in foundry, and with Micron and SK hynix in memory - all under one roof.
Vertical integration is unfashionable until it isn't. Samsung makes the screen, the chip, and the phone - and sells the first two to the people making the third.— YesPress Newsroom
That structure creates a hedge most rivals lack. When smartphone demand softens, the component business can carry the quarter, and vice versa. In 2026 the semiconductor cycle turned sharply upward, and analysts began projecting that Samsung could earn more operating profit in a single year than it had across long stretches of its history combined - a swing driven almost entirely by AI-era memory demand.
Flagship (Galaxy S, Z Fold, Z Flip) and mid-range Android phones. The Galaxy S26 series, launched February 2026, added on-device AI and a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in the Ultra.
Since 2010Galaxy Tab tablets, Galaxy Watch smartwatches, Galaxy Buds earbuds, and the Galaxy Ring - a small health tracker in a growing ambient-wellness lineup.
Since 2014Neo QLED, OLED, and MicroLED televisions, The Frame, plus monitors and commercial signage. Samsung has led the global TV market for well over a decade.
Since 1970Bespoke refrigerators, washers, dryers, air conditioners, and kitchen appliances - increasingly modular and customizable.
Since 1980DRAM, NAND flash, and High Bandwidth Memory for AI accelerators. Samsung is the world's largest memory maker - the engine of its 2026 profits.
Since 1983Contract chip manufacturing at advanced nodes, plus Exynos application processors and image sensors used in cameras worldwide.
Since 2005Samsung makes money by manufacturing at enormous scale and selling into two very different channels. The DX division sells finished consumer products, where revenue depends on unit volume and how many buyers step up to premium models. The DS division sells components, where revenue rides the notoriously cyclical semiconductor market - feast when memory is scarce, famine when it is oversupplied.
The company's deepest expertise is in that component layer: decades of process engineering in memory fabrication, display panels, and advanced packaging. It is this know-how, plus a record R&D budget of KRW 26.9 trillion as of late 2025, that lets Samsung stay at the front of the memory race just as AI turns memory bandwidth into one of computing's scarcest resources.
Samsung occupies a spot almost no other company holds: it is simultaneously a household consumer brand and a foundational supplier to the entire electronics industry. In phones it is one of the top two vendors worldwide. In TVs it is the long-standing leader. In memory it is number one, and in foundry it is the primary alternative to TSMC. Because so many devices - including rival products - contain Samsung parts, the company functions less like a single competitor and more like infrastructure for modern computing.
Be in enough places and you stop being a brand. You become infrastructure.— YesPress Newsroom
Lee Byung-chul founds Samsung in Taegu, Korea, exporting noodles and dried goods.
The electronics division is formally founded on January 13 in Suwon.
Samsung launches its first black-and-white television in November.
Samsung enters DRAM production, beginning its climb toward chip leadership.
The first Galaxy S smartphone kicks off Samsung's flagship Android franchise.
Samsung briefly overtakes Intel as the world's largest semiconductor company by revenue.
All-time-high quarterly revenue as AI memory demand surges and the Galaxy S26 outsells expectations.
Samsung lifts Galaxy S26 series production toward ~1.5 million units for July after demand beat forecasts.
Announced Q2 2026 earnings guidance with consolidated sales around KRW 171 trillion, powered by AI memory.
Reported all-time record Q1 revenue of KRW 133.9 trillion and record operating profit of KRW 57.2 trillion.
Unveiled the S26, S26+, and S26 Ultra, with general availability from March 11, 2026.
Smartphones (Galaxy), TVs, home appliances, tablets and wearables, plus memory chips, foundry services, displays, and processors sold to other companies.
The Samsung Group began as a trading company in 1938; Samsung Electronics was established on January 13, 1969.
Lee Byung-chul founded the Samsung Group in 1938 in Taegu, Korea.
It leads in both, but its semiconductor business - especially memory and HBM - drove its record profits in 2026, outpacing the mobile division.
Yes. Samsung is a major supplier of memory chips, displays, and processors, and its components appear in devices made by rival brands.
Sources: Samsung.com, Samsung Global Newsroom, Wikipedia, Britannica, Forbes, SamMobile. Financial figures are as reported for 2026 quarters and may be revised. Market-share figures are approximate and vary by source and quarter.