Samsung sells stakes in Seagate, Rambus, Sharp and ASML

Samsung Electronics has sold all of its stakes in Rambus, Seagate and Sharp, and half of its stake in ASML. The company says it wants to free up money and focus on its primary business.

The Korean electronics giant owned 4.2 percent stake in Seagate, 4.5 percent in Rambus and 0.7 percent in Sharp. The sale of the shares has brought Samsung about eight hundred million euros, Bloomberg writes.

According to Samsung, business relationships between the companies remain intact. In 2011, Seagate acquired Samsung’s hard drive division. Since this acquisition, SSDs sold by Seagate have been manufactured by Samsung and Samsung only uses Seagate hard drives in its products.

Rambus is a company that manages a few ram patents and mainly lives off the revenues from the licenses and lawsuits related to these patents. Samsung also has to pay licensing costs to Rambus. The companies reached a settlement in 2010, under which Samsung, among other things, had to buy two hundred million dollars in Rambus shares. In 2015, Rambus announced that it was going to produce its own ddr4 ram.

ASML previously indicated that the share sale has nothing to do with the development of EUV machines, which are necessary for the further development of smaller and more energy-efficient chips. Until the sale, which took place on September 12, Samsung owned 2.9 percent of the chip manufacturer. After the sale, this part is halved.