[QUOTE=Kenshin;2650664]I can’t find any in South Korea, either. The list is from South Korean price comparison website Danawa. Even if SK Hynix makes their own SSD’s like Samsung and Toshiba, they are probably only shipped to OEM brands. Both Samsung and Hynix make both DRAM chips and DRAM modules and they are sold in the retail Yongsan markets in Seoul, but Hynix is much weaker and smaller in the retail market than Samsung. whereas Micron’s Crucial has sold to end users on its own website and through other retailers for more than ten years.[/QUOTE]
Here is an Anandtech review of Corsair Neutron GTX SSD 240GB based on controllers made by LMAD (Link A Media) recently acquired by SK Hynix.
SK was a Japanese textile company founded in 1939, nationalized in 1945, destroyed during the Korean War, bought by the late Choi Jong Geon, the uncle of the present CEO, acquired Korea National Oil in 1980, and made SKC video tapes and audio tapes in the 1980s and CD-R media in the 1990s. SK Group now has shipping, telecommunications, energy, and at last DRAM and NAND, too. Annual revenue is a little over US$100 billion. The wife of the group’s present CEO and Chairman is the daughter of Roh Taewoo (president 1987 - 1992.) Whether the present SK Group management can drive SK Hynix successfully against Samsung and Micron is not easy to predict. It was lucky enough for SK to succeed in the mobile telecommunications and SK later bought some cable internet service providers. SK has some share of the global energy market as South Korea has to import a lot of petroleum and natural gas and sell gasoline and LPG to all the drivers. There is a limit to growth in that area as domestic production of raw energy sources is virtually zero. What the group makes out of transporting, processing, and distributing oil and gas is negligible compared to what ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell make. SK failed to enter mobile telecommunications markets of other countries, but successfully prevented South Korean government and regulatory agencies from opening the domestic market to NTT and AT&T. The domestic market is small with just less than 50 million subscribers compared to the hundreds of millions of China and the USA, but SK Telecom makes steady profits, billions of US dollars each year, unlike Verizon Wireless and AT&T, because the government officials and those supposed to police businesses are often SK Telecom itself, or the biggest rival KT (Korea Telecom). The steady net income of SK Telecom is important in the future of SK Hynix just as the profits Samsung Electronics had made out of the DRAM business was important for its then-future CPU and NAND businesses, and later also mobile phones and mobile chips as well. It is unlikely SK will give up Hynix too soon even if it becomes clear to everyone it cannot make profits until around 2020. Hynix itself was created by merging the semiconductor businesses of LG Electronics and Hyundai Electronics by the state, the very force that destroyed Daewoo Group, once one of the three South Korean electronics makers that also made tanks, subway cars, rifles, computers, ships, automobiles. Since they are all family businesses, M&A rules usually don’t apply. Family rivalry and pride matter more.
