Research & development expenditure at Samsung Electronics 2009-2021

The levels of research & development expenditure at Samsung Electronics between 2009 and 2021 has been increasing. The official figures were published in South Korean won. The sums in U.S. dollars have solely been provided to aid in the understanding of the statistic and are not official figures from the Samsung corporation. In 2021, total spending on research and development at Samsung Electronics amounted to approximately 22.6 trillion South Korean won.

Samsung R&D spending

Samsung, a global leader in semiconductors, telecommunications and digital media technologies, spent nearly 14 billion U.S. dollars on research and development in 2014. This amount is considerably higher than the 2009 figure, when Samsung spent around seven billion U.S. dollars on research and development. Their expenditure has almost doubled. Samsung’s investment manifests, for example, in the more than six thousand U.S. patents as of 2020. Only IBM has more patents, while spending 6.3 billion U.S. dollars on research and development.

Investment in R&D

Software and computer services companies, and technology hardware and equipment companies tend to invest heavily on research and development. In the last few years, companies from these two industrial sectors spent, on average, about eight to 12 percent of their total revenue on R&D. In the electronics and electrical appliances industry – another market in which Samsung has a strong presence – companies invest about four to five percent of their revenues in R&D. In 2021, Samsung invested more than nine percent of its total global revenue on research and development.