Samsung Electronics has overtaken U.S. company Micron to rank No. 1 in market share in the global automotive memory semiconductor market for the first time. With demand growing for high-performance memory as Autonomous Driving and in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) advance, the gain is seen as driven by expanded share in high-growth markets such as China.
According to a report by the automotive market research firm S&P Global Mobility on the 31st, Samsung Electronics' market share in automotive memory rose to 40% last year from 35% in 2024. Micron, the previous No. 1, fell to 36% from 40% over the same period, slipping to second place.
This is the first time Samsung Electronics has outpaced Micron in the automotive memory market. Micron has long been strong in the automotive and industrial memory markets. Automotive memory has been considered a difficult market for new entrants because carmakers have lengthy validation processes and conservative supply chain management.
A shift in the growth axis of the automotive memory market also worked in Samsung Electronics' favor, analysts said. In the past, automotive memory was viewed within the memory industry as a relatively low value-added market due to long product replacement cycles of seven to eight years and limited demand. But as vehicles shift to electric cars, autonomous vehicles, and software-defined vehicles (SDV), demand for high-capacity, high-performance memory is rising rapidly.
S&P Global Mobility projected the automotive semiconductor market would grow from about $90 billion (about 135.63 trillion won) in 2025 to about $139 billion (about 209.47 trillion won) in 2031. As the semiconductor content per vehicle increases, it is expected to drive market growth. Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), centralized computing architectures, and the advancement of in-vehicle infotainment are boosting memory demand.
Samsung Electronics' expanded share is seen as the result of its push into the Chinese market coupled with a broader portfolio of high-performance products. S&P Global Mobility expects China to account for 43% of global automotive semiconductor consumption by 2030. China is a market where electric vehicle production, ADAS adoption, and SDV introduction are moving quickly.
Samsung Electronics entered the automotive semiconductor market in earnest in 2015, targeting high-performance infotainment systems and Autonomous Driving vehicles with low-power memory solutions such as low-power DRAM (LPDDR) and Universal Flash Storage (UFS). It has sequentially expanded its business to automotive solid-state drives (SSD) and graphics DRAM (GDDR).
S&P Global Mobility analyzed that about 90% of global automotive DRAM production is concentrated among a few companies, including Micron, Samsung Electronics, and SK hynix. With demand from artificial intelligence (AI) data centers surging, memory makers are prioritizing production capacity for high bandwidth memory (HBM) and server products, putting automakers in competition to secure automotive memory.
Accordingly, prices for older-generation automotive memories widely used in infotainment and ADAS, such as DDR4 and LPDDR4, rose about 70% early this year from a year earlier. Additional increases are expected early next year. Automakers are responding by signing long-term supply contracts or by changing their vehicle electrical/electronic (E/E) architectures to support next-generation memories such as LPDDR5.
Samsung Electronics is known to supply automotive memory to Qualcomm, Bosch, Tesla, and Denso. Samsung Electronics plans to continue its push into the automotive memory market with high-performance DRAM such as LPDDR5X and LPDDR5, high-reliability memory that meets automotive quality standards, and automotive SSDs based on advanced V-NAND.