Samsung has made a $48 million investment in fellow South Korean firm Pantech in return for a 10 percent stake. Samsung is the world's top seller of smartphones and mobile phones. Smaller company Pantech is Korea's No. 3 phone maker and is producing branded mobile phones for Verizon and AT&T in the U.S. The deal is expected to result in a tightened collaboration between the two companies in smartphone design and other areas.
What Else You Need To Know
- Last year, Pantech spent more than $200 million buying electronics and components from Samsung affiliated businesses to order to build its devices.
- Pantech has been struggling with debt and previously signed a deal to convert $75 million of royalty debt owed to chipmaker Qualcomm into equity.
- Samsung will become the third-largest stakeholder, following Qualcomm (11.96 percent) and Korea's Development Bank (11.81 percent).
- The $48 million is just a small piece of Samsung's cash hoard, which was around $28.5 billion as of the end of March.
Other sources
The deal is quite unique in a sense, because devices from Pantech compete with Samsung’s range of smartphones and tablets, and it isn’t often that rival companies would collaborate in an investment deal such as this.- Jon Russell, The Next Web
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