Samsung Electronics Co. has replaced the chief of its internal control tower for the first time in eight years, upgrading its Business Support Task Force into a formal division — the Business Support Office — in a move expected to accelerate Chairman Jay Y. Lee’s “New Samsung” initiative.
On Friday, the South Korean chipmaker appointed Park Hak Kyu, executive of the task force and head of the Devices Solutions’ corporate management office at Samsung Electronics, to lead the revamped control tower.
The former chief financial officer at the chipmaker succeeds Vice Chairman Jeong Hyeon-ho. Jeong headed the team since 2017, the same year Chairman Lee was sentenced to five years in prison for alleged corporate wrongdoing, before being paroled the following year.
Jeong, a longtime aide to Lee, will step back to an advisory role.
STEP INTO SPOTLIGHT
The reshuffle marks a significant leadership shake-up at Samsung following Lee’s acquittal of all charges of accounting fraud and stock manipulation, a legal battle he fought for nearly a decade.
He has now stepped into the spotlight to reinforce his leadership. Lee is exploring strategic partnerships with automakers such as Tesla Inc. and Nvidia Corp., Samsung’s key customer and the world’s largest graphics processing unit maker, in its push into new growth areas including robotics, biotechnology and mobility.
The new Business Support Office comprises three teams — strategy, human resources and management diagnostics — thus consolidating functions previously handled by the task force.
The strategy team will be led by Choi Yoon-ho, president and former CEO of Samsung SDI Co., and previously head of Samsung Global Research.
Executive Vice Presidents Joo Chang-hoon and Moon Hee-dong, both HR specialists, were appointed as heads of the Office’s management diagnostics team and the human resources team, respectively.
By formalizing the group’s control tower and expanding its scope to include audit and consulting functions alongside strategy and human resources, Chairman Lee appears to be strengthening his grip over Samsung’s management structure.
The leadership change comes as Samsung made a strong comeback in the third quarter with better-than-expected results. But it still lags behind local rival SK Hynix Inc. in the market of high-performing AI chips, or high-bandwidth memory (HBM).
Another key challenge for Lee is to narrow the gap with foundry leader TSMC in the contract chipmaking market.
YEAR-END RESHUFFLES IN PIPELINE
The overhaul may signal a broader wave of year-end leadership shifts and organizational changes later this month.
In November of last year, the company replaced the three key posts at its semiconductor business: memory, foundry and system LSI.
Painting an upbeat outlook, Samsung has already sold out next year’s production of its next-generation HBM4 chips after launching long-awaited HBM3E shipments to Nvidia Corp. in the third quarter, fueled by surging demand for chips for AI applications and data centers.
