Samsung Electro-Mechanics Brand Guidelines: Suwon’s 1973 Parts Maker Turned MLCC Specialist

Four names in fourteen years.

Samsung Electro-Mechanics began in 1973. The company’s own history says it was incorporated in August 1973 as Samsung Sanyo Parts Co., and it marks November 1973 as its foundation anniversary. The name changed quickly: in March 1974 it dropped Sanyo from its name — the company gives the new name as Samsung Electro-Mechanics Parts, while English Wikipedia gives it as Samsung Electric Parts — and in May 1977 it became Samsung Electronics Parts. In February 1987 it took its present name, Samsung Electro-Mechanics; in Korean it is Samsung Jeongi.

Its early work was in consumer electronics. The company says it laid the foundation for a self-reliant components industry in Korea by making parts for audio and video equipment, and that in April 1978 it developed its own tuners for colour televisions. It was listed on the Korea Stock Exchange in February 1979, and it opened a research institute in October 1980.

In the 1980s, the company says, it widened into materials and computer components, and in the 1990s it turned to chip components and parts for mobile communications and optical devices. The capacitor story that now defines it starts in this period: the company says that in February 1988 it developed Korea’s first small multilayer ceramic capacitor, in the 1608 size. Korean Wikipedia describes the same arc, from audio and video parts to chip components, camera modules and substrates.

The company is headquartered in Suwon, in Gyeonggi Province, according to English Wikipedia.

MLCCs, inductors, cameras and substrates.

Today Samsung Electro-Mechanics groups its products into three areas, according to its website. Passive components include MLCCs, power inductors, chip resistors, tantalum capacitors and, more recently, silicon capacitors. Modules means mainly camera modules for phones, cars and appliances. Package substrates are the fine circuit boards that connect semiconductor chips to the main board.

MLCCs are the centre of the passive business. Korean Wikipedia explains them as components that store electricity and release it in measured amounts, steadying current in a circuit, and says the company can stack up to 600 layers in a high-capacitance part. The company’s timeline records a long run of size and capacitance milestones that it describes as world firsts, including an 0402 MLCC in 2003 and a 22-microfarad part in the 1608 size in 2006; since 2020 its announcements have shifted towards parts for cars, such as MLCCs for powertrains, driver-assistance systems and electric vehicles, and in June 2026 an automotive MLCC of 100 microfarads in the 1206 size.

Production moved abroad from 1990. The company lists a Thai manufacturing subsidiary in 1990, a multilayer circuit-board plant at its Sejong site in 1991, subsidiaries in Dongguan in 1992, Tianjin in 1994 and the Philippines in 1997, Gaoxin in China in 2001 and Vietnam in 2013, and new plants in the Philippines and Tianjin in 2017. English Wikipedia names manufacturing at Sejong and Busan in Korea and at Calamba in the Philippines, and Korean Wikipedia lists production subsidiaries in China, the Philippines and Vietnam.

Substrates have grown in importance. The company says it was the first in Korea to mass-produce high-performance FCBGA package substrates for servers, in November 2022; that it agreed in July 2024 to supply substrates to AMD for data centres; and that it began mass production of substrates for AI accelerators in June 2025. In November 2025 it signed a memorandum with Sumitomo Chemical Group on glass cores for package substrates, it says.

Design and documentation.

Passive components are hard to photograph and harder to brand. A multilayer ceramic capacitor in the smallest sizes is a speck that sits like a grain of sand on a fingertip, and a scatter of chips on a fingertip is one way to show that scale. Resistors, inductors, filters and fuses look little different from one maker to the next, so the presentation leans on the company’s name, its colours and the way it pictures the work behind the part.

The pictures repeat across the trade. Reels of tape-and-reel parts, ready for pick-and-place machines, stand for volume. Through-hole resistors with their coloured bands, cut-away capacitors that open up the layers or the wound film inside, and close-ups of ceramic sheets being stacked stand for the craft. Automated inspection lines, with cameras checking each part, stand for consistency, and pictures of factories and laboratories often stand in for the end products the parts go into.

Trade shows are where these brands meet engineers in person. electronica in Munich and CEATEC in Japan are among the fairs where component makers take large stands, and some use them for showpieces that have little to do with a datasheet: Murata, for one, says it demonstrated its bicycle-riding Murata Boy robot at CEATEC JAPAN 2005.

Many of these companies began with a material rather than a product: ferrite, titanium oxide, barium titanate, tantalum or film. Several have changed hands or merged, so names, marks and owners do not always line up. This guide sets out who founded each brand, who owns it now and where it says its parts are made, and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Samsung affiliate that narrowed its focus.

Samsung Electro-Mechanics is a listed company within the Samsung Group, and English Wikipedia lists Samsung Electronics as its largest shareholder. Its board, English Wikipedia says, had three inside and four independent directors as of January 2026, with an independent director as chair. Korean Wikipedia says Chang Duck-hyun was appointed chief executive in 2022.

The company has also pared back. In January 2021 it agreed to sell its Wi-Fi module business to Wits, a subsidiary of the Korean company Chemtronics, but Wits cancelled the deal in May, citing rapid changes in the Wi-Fi module market, The Asia Business Daily reported in August 2021. The same report said Samsung Electro-Mechanics was trying again through the sale of shares in its Thai subsidiary, and that it planned to concentrate on MLCCs for IT and automotive uses and on high-specification semiconductor package substrates. Korean Wikipedia records that the company withdrew from the communication-module business in November 2024. Earlier, in April 2009, it set up Samsung LED as a joint venture with Samsung Electronics, according to Korean Wikipedia.

The company also presents itself through sustainability ratings. Its website says it has been included in the DJSI World Index for 16 consecutive years and in FTSE4Good for 14, and English Wikipedia notes recognition from the Carbon Disclosure Project’s Korea committee between 2014 and 2016. Its history also records that its Suwon plant gained ISO 14001 environmental certification in October 1996, which it describes as a first in the global electronic-components industry.

Its website describes the company as a maker of parts “from mechanical parts to high-tech electronic parts,” and says it aims to expand through products for AI computing. In December 2025, its history adds, it invested in Alba Industries, a company specialising in small electric motors.

For a design guide, Samsung Electro-Mechanics shows how a parts maker inside a large group can define itself by a few core technologies. Compare Samsung, the group name it shares, and Murata, the Japanese MLCC maker. For this guide we use cobalt, a wafer grey and a brass with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Samsung Electro-Mechanics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.