世界市場の獲得からみた韓国半導体産業の持続的発展

サムスン電子の標準化活動を中心に

抄録

East Asian countries have accomplished economic development via a process of catching up to the developed countries in the global market. Spearheading that catch-up process are the newly industrialized economies (NIEs). Although NIEs have been able to catch-up to the developed countries, they are now faced with the task of how to overcome the pattern of catch-up development.
The purpose of this paper is to consider how NIEs survive in the global market. In this paper I would like to highlight the exemplary success of the semiconductor business of Samsung Electronics as a pioneer in overcoming the catch-up phase. In particular, I would like to describe how Samsung established an advantage over Japanese firms in the development of high-speed DRAM in the 1990s, with emphasis on the standardization of DRAM that Samsung brought about.
Many argue that Samsung succeeded in its catch-up in the high-density DRAM market by expanding its production capability and achieving economies of scale. The strategy was effective because the development target was fixed and foreseeable. However, after Samsung’s catch-up, it has come to hold the key to its growth, thereby gaining dominance in the high-speed DRAM market. That development target is unforeseeable. In other words, the factors that enabled Samsung to achieve catch-up were no longer sufficient to sustain and strengthen its position in the DRAM market.
This paper will examine that a major factor in Samsung’s growth in the 2000s is its success in swiftly seizing the next-generation mainstream market of high-speed DRAM, i.e. DDR SDRAM. Samsung’s leap ahead of other firms is closely related to Samsung’s technology becoming the DDR standard specification. Samsung’s DDR development was targeted at different application products from Japanese firms, and had a decisive effect on its technology being chosen as the standard.