Samsung Electronics Plans $7.2 Bln Buyback after Share Price Plunges

A Samsung logo is displayed in a supermarket in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, October 29, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
A Samsung logo is displayed in a supermarket in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, October 29, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
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Samsung Electronics Plans $7.2 Bln Buyback after Share Price Plunges

A Samsung logo is displayed in a supermarket in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, October 29, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
A Samsung logo is displayed in a supermarket in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, October 29, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

Samsung Electronics has decided to buy back shares worth 10 trillion won ($7.17 billion) over a one-year period to boost shareholder value, after shares plunged to more than four-year lows earlier in the week.
It is the first time Samsung Electronics has decided to buy back shares since 2017.
Of the total, three trillion won worth of shares, or 50.14 million common shares and 6.91 million preferred shares, will be repurchased in the next three months and cancelled, Samsung said after the market closed on Friday.
The board of directors will decide on ways to enhance shareholder value, including when and how to use the remaining seven trillion in the repurchase programme, Reuters quoted it as saying in a statement.
In the short term, the decision would likely help Samsung's share performance, but the company needs concrete business plans to better support its share performance, analysts said.
The world's top memory chip maker last month apologised for a disappointing quarterly profit, as it lagged rivals in supplying artificial intelligence chips to Nvidia. Samsung was the worst performing stock among major global chipmakers, also hurt by President-elect Donald Trump's threat to levy tariffs on imports that would hit demand for electronics products.
"It is a reflection that Samsung feels a sense of crisis due to the sharp stock drops," said Park Ju-gun, head of corporate analysis firm Leaders Index.
Park said the share buyback may intend to bolster depressed stock prices for Samsung shareholders including Chairman Jay Y. Lee's family members, who have put up some of their Samsung stocks as collateral to help pay inheritance taxes, as recent plunges threaten to trigger a margin call - a request for more collateral from banks for Lee's mother and his two sisters.
Shares of Samsung Electronics rose 7.2% on Friday, their biggest daily jump since March 2020 and rebounding from their lowest level since mid-June 2020. They were still down 32% year-to-date.



Anthropic Says Looking to Power European Tech with Hiring Push

As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
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Anthropic Says Looking to Power European Tech with Hiring Push

As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File
As the AI race heats up, so does the race to find talent in the sector, which is currently dominated by US and Chinese companies. Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP/File

American AI giant Anthropic aims to boost the European tech ecosystem as it expands on the continent, product chief Mike Krieger told AFP Thursday at the Vivatech trade fair in Paris.

The OpenAI competitor wants to be "the engine behind some of the largest startups of tomorrow... (and) many of them can and should come from Europe", Krieger said.

Tech industry and political leaders have often lamented Europe's failure to capitalize on its research and education strength to build heavyweight local companies -- with many young founders instead leaving to set up shop across the Atlantic.

Krieger's praise for the region's "really strong talent pipeline" chimed with an air of continental tech optimism at Vivatech.

French AI startup Mistral on Wednesday announced a multibillion-dollar tie-up to bring high-powered computing resources from chip behemoth Nvidia to the region.

The semiconductor firm will "increase the amount of AI computing capacity in Europe by a factor of 10" within two years, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang told an audience at the southern Paris convention center.

Among 100 planned continental hires, Anthropic is building up its technical and research strength in Europe, where it has offices in Dublin and non-EU capital London, Krieger said.

Beyond the startups he hopes to boost, many long-standing European companies "have a really strong appetite for transforming themselves with AI", he added, citing luxury giant LVMH, which had a large footprint at Vivatech.

'Safe by design'

Mistral -- founded only in 2023 and far smaller than American industry leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic -- is nevertheless "definitely in the conversation" in the industry, Krieger said.

The French firm recently followed in the footsteps of the US companies by releasing a so-called "reasoning" model able to take on more complex tasks.

"I talk to customers all the time that are maybe using (Anthropic's AI) Claude for some of the long-horizon agentic tasks, but then they've also fine-tuned Mistral for one of their data processing tasks, and I think they can co-exist in that way," Krieger said.

So-called "agentic" AI models -- including the most recent versions of Claude -- work as autonomous or semi-autonomous agents that are able to do work over longer horizons with less human supervision, including by interacting with tools like web browsers and email.

Capabilities displayed by the latest releases have raised fears among some researchers, such as University of Montreal professor and "AI godfather" Yoshua Bengio, that independently acting AI could soon pose a risk to humanity.

Bengio last week launched a non-profit, LawZero, to develop "safe-by-design" AI -- originally a key founding promise of OpenAI and Anthropic.

'Very specific genius'

"A huge part of why I joined Anthropic was because of how seriously they were taking that question" of AI safety, said Krieger, a Brazilian software engineer who co-founded Instagram, which he left in 2018.

Anthropic is still working on measures designed to restrict their AI models' potential to do harm, he added.

But it has yet to release details of its "level 4" AI safety protections foreseen for still more powerful models, after activating ASL (AI Safety Level) 3 to corral the capabilities of May's Claude Opus 4 release.

Developing ASL 4 is "an active part of the work of the company", Krieger said, without giving a potential release date.

With Claude 4 Opus, "we've deployed the mitigations kind of proactively... safe doesn't have to mean slow, but it does mean having to be thoughtful and proactive ahead of time" to make sure safety protections don't impair performance, he added.

Looking to upcoming releases from Anthropic, Krieger said the company's models were on track to match chief executive Dario Amodei's prediction that Anthropic would offer customers access to a "country of geniuses in a data center" by 2026 or 2027 -- within limits.

Anthropic's latest AI models are "genius-level at some very specific things", he said.

"In the coming year... it will continue to spike in particular aspects of things, and still need a lot of human-in-the-loop coordination," he forecast.