Samsung’s £9.6bn record profits

Samsung Electronics was crowned the most profitable tech group this summer,  marking its decade-long metamorphosis from a purveyor of cheap consumer goods to a household name.

The group announced record-breaking profits for the third quarter of Won 14.5tn ( £9.6billion) – a near trebling from the same period a year earlier.

The Group – the jewel in the crown of the Samsung conglomerate has outlined its ambitions in a host of cutting-edge technologies, including artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, and Internet-connected home appliances.

Samsung Electronics’ weakness in software and artificial intelligence compared to its rivals was highlighted this week by the airlift in of a Silicon Valley expert to improve its Bixby voice assistant which was integrated into Samsung S8 mobile phone this year. ” Bixby has fallen short of the market and customers”

“To develop artificial intelligence and internet-of-things technologies, Samsung needs to acquire competitive software makers to make up for its weakness in the area.

Samsung’s strength in chipmaking is likely to aid its ambitions in autonomous driving as by 2020 autonomous driving will require 4, 000 gigabytes of data per car per day, and by taking advantage of this Samsung should focus on the necessary components for data storage, rather than the self-driving technology itself.

Samsung has been testing self-driving software adapted to Hyundai cars on roads in South Korea and California, and with this in mind Seoul-headquartered group bought out automotive component supplier Harman International to clearly get an edge in internet connected car technologies.

Global titans like Google, Facebook and Amazon will all need more and more customised chips from Samsung as they build large scale high functioning data servers, to enlarge their storage capacity and differentiated cloud services.