What about SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics?The Ministry of Industry said, "There is little impact."

[Anchor]
South Korea's semiconductor industry is increasingly anxious as the U.S. says not to sell high-bandwidth memory, Korea's main export item, to China.

First of all, the government said that the impact was small, but Samsung Electronics, which exports high-bandwidth memory to China, is expected to be partially affected.

Reporter Choi Ah-young reports.

[Reporter]
Currently, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix account for 95% of the global high-bandwidth memory market.

It is our semiconductor company's flagship export item with artificial intelligence accelerators and high-performance memory essential for training.

However, the impact became inevitable as the U.S., which has HBM source technology, controlled not to sell it to China.

SK Hynix is not expected to have a significant impact on Nvidia, a U.S. company, for now.

On the other hand, Samsung Electronics is expected to be partially affected as about 20 percent of its HBM sales come from China.

Another painful point was that it fell behind in the development of 5th generation HBMs.

[Lee Joo-wan / Industry analyst: (Samsung Electronics) had a high proportion of low-priced second and third-generation products, so they were being delivered to China. This volume is likely to have a bad effect of sharply shrinking.]

There are also concerns that it could dampen the global HBM market in the long run.

[Lee Jong-hwan / Sangmyung University System Semiconductor Professor: AI semiconductors need to continue to increase and expand production, so exports to China are expected.]

The government believes the U.S. move will have little impact on the domestic industry.

Only for direct export of HBM to China and not for products packaged with logic chips etc.

It will be possible to minimize the impact by switching to the way U.S. regulations allow.

In addition, the export control of additional semiconductor equipment is also expected to have a limited impact.

At the same time, it said it had agreed with the U.S. government to work to ensure that companies in both countries did not suffer unexpected damage.

I'm YTN's Choi Ayoung.

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