SP SAMHWA Renames, Targets Advanced Materials - 조선일보
A Korean paint company is now in Samsung's semiconductor supply chain. Whether it stays there is the question worth asking.
Samhwa Paint — which rebranded to SP SAMHWA this year for its 80th anniversary — announced March 6 that it has begun mass production and supply of a high-performance material called MMB, developed jointly with Samsung SDI. The product is being used in the packaging of Samsung Electronics' Exynos 2600 application processor, the chip powering the Galaxy S26 series. That's a real qualification, not a press release ambition.
MMB — Melt Master Batch — is a semi-finished material used to produce epoxy molding compound, the encapsulant that seals and protects semiconductor chips inside their packages. It is not a headline-grabbing product. It is also not a commodity: the companies applied a pre-reaction synthesis process that Samhwa says produces better chemical stability and compositional uniformity than the conventional dry blend method. The technical claim is that this reduces semiconductor warpage during packaging while improving moisture resistance and heat dissipation.
Samsung Electronics confirmed in December that the Exynos 2600 incorporates a Heat Path Block packaging design that uses high-thermal-conductivity EMC, and that this reduced the chip's internal thermal resistance by 16 percent compared to the previous generation. That 16 percent improvement is the benchmark the MMB had to meet. Samhwa built dedicated reaction equipment, grinders, and filtration systems to produce it at the purity levels semiconductor manufacturing requires — foreign particle contamination is the failure mode that ends a supplier relationship.
The stock market noticed. Samhwa Paint (ticker: 000390) hit its upper limit on the Korea Exchange the day of the announcement, gaining 29.91 percent to close at 10,120 won. That reaction reflects the scale of the if — if the Samsung SDI relationship holds, if Samsung Electronics expands MMB usage beyond a single mobile chip, if the move into AI server memory (DRAM and NAND, which Samhwa has named as targets) actually materializes.
The rebranding is the signal, not the story. Samhwa spent decades as a coatings company — architectural paints, industrial coatings, waterproofing systems. The business area pages on the SP SAMHWA website still lead with paint. The company's own language frames the Samsung SDI partnership as proof of concept rather than completed transformation: a company official said the MMB development "has proven our technological competitiveness in the semiconductor materials market" and that Samhwa "will expand our electronic materials business including not only semiconductors but also secondary batteries, leaping beyond paint manufacturing."
That leap is the speculative part. Secondary battery materials are a crowded field. Samhwa announced it will show 14 secondary battery material products at InterBattery 2026 in Seoul from March 11-13 — thermal control materials, electrolyte additives, flame retardant coatings. Showing is not shipping. The InterBattery presence is positioning, not evidence of a materials platform.
The Samsung SDI MMB contract is the only concrete milestone in this story. It took eighteen months from the April 2025 joint development agreement to production-ready supply. That's a reasonable timeline for qualifying a new material into a Samsung supply chain, assuming no setbacks. Whether the volume grows beyond the Exynos 2600 — a single mobile chip — is not answered by the announcement. The path from mobile AP packaging to AI server DRAM and NAND memory packaging is a different qualification track, with different thermal and reliability requirements, and Samhwa has not disclosed customer commitments beyond Samsung SDI.
What is worth knowing: a company whose core business is paint has successfully qualified a specialty material into Samsung's semiconductor packaging supply chain. The pre-reaction MMB process is technically differentiated from conventional dry blending, and the Exynos 2600 HPB thermal requirement (16 percent improvement) was met. Whether Samhwa can replicate that performance at AI server scale, in memory packaging, with other customers, or as anything more than a Samsung SDI-exclusive tier-two supplier — that is the story that has not been written yet.
The rebranding from Samhwa Paint to SP SAMHWA is cosmetic. The MMB qualification is real. One of those things matters for the next earnings call.
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