Samsung boosted its foundry business with a win from Qualcomm to produce mobile application processors for low-end 5G smartphones, Yonhap News Agency reported.

The South Korean smartphone and chip vendor was tipped to make 5G versions of Snapdragon 4-series processors, which Qualcomm revealed last week and are scheduled to appear in commercial devices early in 2021.

Yonhap News Agency noted Samsung lags in the foundry sector, citing TrendForce data predicting the vendor would achieve a 17.4 per cent share of the market in the current quarter compared with an anticipated 53.9 per cent for market leader TSMC.

If the report is accurate it would be a big boost for a Samsung strategy to beef-up its System LSI and Foundry businesses. In April 2019, it announced plans to invest KRW133 trillion ($112 billion) over 11 years in its System LSI and Foundry businesses.

Yonhap News Agency noted Samsung recently lined up orders to produce next-generation processing units for Nvidia and data centre chips for IBM using its 7nm technology.