In any large company worth its salt, there is a maxim that is usually followed every year or every few years: internal investigation. But what do you do when, in your own company, the information provided is false by your own employees and is not going to be reflected in the accounts? Well, you have a big problem. Falsification of economic data is something that can be detected, falsification of pad performance data… That is another matter as they say. For this reason, Samsung has opened an internal investigation that could paralyze its factories if things get complicated.
This is precisely what Samsung thinks happened and if it were true, we would be talking about a problem of such magnitude that it could cripple its factories to get to the bottom of it. The problem is such that false data and reports are reported by a specific subsidiary, which added to the rumors that we have seen for a month everything can explode.
Samsung’s internal investigation into its DS subsidiary
Semiconductor Business and Device Solutions (DS), the Samsung division in charge of a very complicated and crucial task in the company: to manufacture the new nodes and wafers which fight against Intel and TSMC. Well, as we know and have said many times, Samsung seems to come before its two rivals to GAA technology thanks to a strategy where it has not continued to invest in FinFET, which has relegated to the third step of the podium, but the It was not as expected…
The performance of pads in 5nm, 4nm and 3nm of the company (two in FinFET and one in GAA or MBCFET as an internal name) is not reported by DS, so the alarms ended up going off when it was found not to acted not from something specific, but from the norm. What is really the problem? Well, there’s one suspicion that spurred Samsung’s internal investigation: counterfeiting.
New and old employees in the eye of the storm
The DS division has updated the staff and laid off other employees for various reasons, so at the moment it is not clear who is to blame, but in general we are talking about the workers when we say that there have been falsified information on the performance of semiconductor manufacturing in the named processes.
When the returns provided by the DS employees were accepted as good, the mass production started and after that everything came to light as they were unable to fulfill the contracts already signed for their customers, which they either direct or third party. If the production and its volume have been falsified, this drives the entire production chain of the company and could give rise to a temporary closure of the factories to identify where the problems are and to be able to locate the culprits if there were any.
What happens after all of this? Well, Samsung has set an unrealistic price per wafer due to false performance data, so already sealed contracts can cost the company a lot of money and also can’t meet the agreed volume as long as she does not understand what is happening. The quickest translation would be an increase in the price of wafers from the next firm (NAND Flash above all), which, as we can already guess, would be an increase in the prices of products that integrate their chips. We’ll see where it all ends up when the investigation is over.
