The paperwork took a day. In a regulatory filing on Tuesday, Samsung Electronics said Hong Ra-hee, honorary director of the Leeum Museum of Art, will transfer 11,158,000 common shares of the company to her son, Chairman Lee Jae-yong. The gift agreement was signed on Oct. 12. Settlement is set for Nov. 12.
At Tuesday’s closing price of 232,000 won, the stake is worth about 2.6 trillion won, or roughly $1.9 billion. Lee’s holding rises to 116,377,053 shares, or 1.75% of the company, from 105,219,053 shares and 1.58%. Hong’s stake falls to 0.81% from 0.98%. Because both parties belong to the founding family, Samsung’s combined family ownership does not change. What changes is the tax bill. The transfer is a gift between relatives, which leaves Lee owing an estimated 1.5 trillion won or more in gift tax, calculated on the average share price over the two months before and after the transfer and settled early next year.
The gift is the tail end of the largest inheritance tax bill in Korean corporate history. Chairman Lee Kun-hee died in 2020, leaving an estate that carried about 12 trillion won in tax, paid by his widow and three children in six installments over five years beginning in 2021. In April, Hong sold 15 million shares at 205,237 won each, raising about 3.1 trillion won, to complete the final installment and close the family’s five-year payment schedule.
Lee Jae-yong financed his share differently. He kept his stakes in the group’s core companies and leaned on dividends and personal loans. In September he bought 7.19 million shares, about 0.11% of the company, from his mother for roughly 1.9 trillion won, a sale that helped her repay the bank loans she had taken to clear the tax. Earlier, in January, she gave him her entire holding in Samsung C&T. The transfer announced Tuesday belongs to the same pattern: shares moving down a generation, with the tax following behind.
On the same day, Korean media reported a second move with a different logic. Samsung affiliates plan to invest a combined 12.26 trillion won, about $9.15 billion, in chip operations, with nearly 8 trillion won, or roughly $6 billion, directed to Vietnam.
Samsung Electronics submitted a plan to invest 105.79 trillion dong, about $4.09 billion, in memory chip testing facilities at Yen Binh Industrial Park in Thai Nguyen province in northern Vietnam. The site covers 265,895 square meters in the same complex as the company’s smartphone plant. The first production line is due to begin operations in the fourth quarter of 2027, with a second in 2028. The lines will perform final testing on DRAM and NAND chips packaged at Samsung’s Cheonan plant in South Korea. No wafers will be made there.
About 63% of the investment, some 66.64 trillion dong, is to be funded by reinvested profits from Samsung’s Vietnamese operations, a structure that ties the build-out to earnings not yet booked. Samsung Vietnam Semiconductor, a back-end unit, was established in March. Samsung is Vietnam’s largest foreign investor, with more than $23 billion committed over decades, and has sent 103 Vietnamese engineers to its Cheonan and Onyang test sites for training on memory testing and equipment operation.
A test fab is the last stop before a chip ships. Electrical signals are fed into the memory to check that data reads and writes at the expected speed, and the parts are checked for errors under heat and voltage. It is not the most advanced step in the business, and it is the one that bottlenecks when demand rises, which is what has happened to legacy DRAM and NAND as AI servers pull supply. Moving that step to Vietnam diversifies export routes and narrows the damage from a disruption at Cheonan or Onyang. It does not relocate wafer fabrication, and Samsung has not said how testing volumes will be divided between the two countries.
The two announcements point in one direction. The share gift concentrates ownership in the chairman’s hands and prices the closing cost of the succession. The Vietnam plan adds back-end capacity where land, power and labor cost less, paid for out of the local unit’s own profit. Both rest on the same assumption: that demand for memory keeps rising while AI infrastructure is built.
That assumption carries the risk in both cases. A gift of this size leaves Lee with a tax bill he must fund without selling the shares that give him control, which is why the family has spent five years converting holdings into cash at the edges while leaving the core intact. The Vietnam build depends on profits the operation has to earn first. If memory prices hold, the sequencing is sound. If they fall, the company will have committed land, equipment and a training pipeline to a market that no longer needs the output.
For now the two moves describe a company preparing its ownership and its supply chain for the same decade. The succession is nearly closed. The capacity race is only starting.
