SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won presides over an emergency meeting of group subsidiary CEOs on Japan’s export curbs on Korea on Aug. 5. (Photo: SK Group)

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won convened an emergency meeting of group subsidiary CEOs on Aug. 5 to look at the implications Japan’s retaliatory export curbs to Korea would have and take countermeasures.

Chairman Chey presided over a meeting of the SUPEX Council at the SK T Tower in downtown Seoul. The SUPEX Council is SK Group’s decision-making body designed to coordinate the group’s pending issues in the last week of each month. Chairman Cho Dae-shik normally heads monthly SUPEX Council meetings, but Chairman Chey presided over the latest SUPEX Council meeting. It was known that the meeting also took place at the request of Chairman Chey.

The meeting was held amid the fallout of Japan’s move to cut Korea from a white-list of countries subject to eased customs shipping-clearance procedures.

SK Hynix, the chip-making subsidiary of SK Group, and SK Innovation, the group’s EV battery maker, are most likely to be buffed by the impact of Japan’s export curbs to Korea.

Chairman Chey called for participants to do their best without wavering and cope with a crisis in a precise manner. An SK Group official said Chairman Chey told CEOs each subsidiary overcome a crisis in a wise fashion and he called for them to redouble efforts to take advantage of the current crisis to create new opportunities.

During the meeting, CEOs looked at the expected repercussions Japan’s export curbs would have and countermeasures and took stock of risks of Japan’s export restrictions, to be prolonged.

Chairman Chey has been receiving a briefing on the possible impact Japan’s export curbs on three raw materials, which took effect on July 4, would have on SK Hynix. He has been in charge of working out countermeasures to cope with Japan’s export restrictions. While speaking at a forum sponsored by the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI), Chairman Chey said the government and companies need to set their own goals as well.

SK Hynix President Lee Seok-hee and SK Hynix President Kim Dong-sup, in charge of overseas cooperation, toured Japan last month to meet with Japanese companies and explore ways of promoting bilateral cooperation.

SK Hynix Accelerating Development of ‘Unmatched’ Technologies

It took eight months for SK Hynix to develop a 128-layer, 1terabyte (TB) triple-level-cell (TLC) four-dimensional NAND flash chip since October, when the chip maker succeeded in the development of a 96-layer 4D NAND flash chip.

The time difference between the 96-layer 4D NAND flash chip and its predecessor was 10 months. SK Hynix has turned out to narrow the time difference between newly introduced NAND flash chips.

SK Hynix is accelerating efforts to develop unmatched technologies to tide over the prolong of the sagging global semiconductor industry and rising uncertainties such as the widening U.S.-China trade war and Japan’s export curbs to Korea.

SK Hynix is mass producing a G6 NAND flash memory chip, making it the first company to do so in the world. The move will raise production efficiency by 40 percent compared to its G5 predecessors. NAND flash memory chips are in wide use for products such as smartphone storage devices and solid-state drives (SSDs).

SK Hynix has a strategy to raise its price competitiveness based on the new G6 products and its share in the global market, which now ranks 5th. SK Hynix announced the development and mass production of a 128-layer, 1terabyte (TB) triple-level-cell (TLC) four-dimensional NAND flash chip on June 26. How to stack cells is a key technology in increasing storage capacity.

G5 NAND flash chips have a 95-layer cell structure, whereas G6 ones have a 128-layer structure, the industry’s highest. Chip-making on each wafer by employing the new G6 technology means a 40 percent improvement in production efficiency over conventional chips.