Samsung Electronics co-CEO Han Jong-Hee died Tuesday while being treated for cardiac arrest, the company said.
He was 63.
Newly appointed co-CEO Jun Young Hyun will take over and assume sole responsibility, Samsung said in a regulatory filing. Jun had just been appointed co-CEO last week after leading the company’s semiconductor division.
Han was also the head of the company’s Device eXperience (DX) Division, joined Samsung in 1988, and spent nearly 40 years helping lead Samsung’s TV business. As the head of the DX Division and Digital Appliances Business, he was credited with helping the company grow despite the challenging business environment.
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He started his career at Samsung as the head of product for the research and development team for the visual display business in 2011.
In 2022, he was appointed CEO of one of the world’s largest producers of electronic devices. He was simultaneously responsible for the company’s consumer electronics and mobile devices division.
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The company specializes in manufacturing a wide variety of consumer and industrial electronics and has two CEOs overseeing the separate divisions.
However, it has been struggling to compete with rivals in the artificial intelligence chip market. It has also been struggling to compete with rival Apple in producing smartphones.
At the shareholder meeting Han chaired last week, he told investors that 2025 would be a difficult year, and Samsung would flexibly respond to President Donald Trump’s tariffs with its global supply chain and manufacturing footprints.
He and other executives were grilled by shareholders at the meeting after the company’s failure to ride an AI boom made it one of the worst-performing tech stocks last year.
In semiconductors, Samsung lags behind SK Hynix in so-called high bandwidth memory chips that Nvidia and others rely on for AI graphic processing units.
“First and foremost, I sincerely apologise for the recent stock performance not meeting your expectations. Over the past year, our company failed to adequately respond to the rapidly evolving AI semiconductor market,” Han said.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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