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Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong arrives at the Seoul Gimpo Business Aviation Center (SGBAC) on July 7 ahead of his departure for Seattle. / Courtesy of Yonhap News

Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong has departed for the United States to attend the Sun Valley Conference, an exclusive annual gathering that brings together global media moguls and tech titans.

Lee arrived at the Seoul Gimpo Business Aviation Center (SGBAC) in Gangseo-gu, Seoul, at around 5:00 p.m. on July 7. He flew out to the US to attend the conference, which runs from July 7 to 11 (local time) at the Sun Valley resort in Idaho.

Hosted annually by the US investment bank Allen & Company, the Sun Valley Conference is a private, invitation-only event. It draws chief executives from global tech giants including Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI. Chairman Lee has been a regular attendee since 2002, leveraging the forum to solidify his international business network.

Historically, this high-profile gathering has served as the birthplace for major mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and strategic alliances among global corporate leaders. With artificial intelligence (AI) expected to dominate this year's agenda amid a fierce global investment race, business analysts anticipate that Lee will engage in multifaceted partnership discussions with top-tier tech executives.

In particular, global interest is poised to center on Samsung Electronics given its unique position as the world's only integrated device manufacturer (IDM) that operates both memory chip and foundry divisions. The tech giant has also been aggressively sharpening its competitive edge in producing High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), the foundational hardware powering modern AI systems.

Meanwhile, Samsung Electronics announced earlier that day that its second-quarter revenue reached 171 trillion won, with operating profit hitting an estimated 89.4 trillion won. This profit scale surpasses that of major global tech companies like Nvidia, immediately breaking the previously held record for the highest quarterly earnings in South Korean corporate history set just in the first quarter of this year.

                                                                                                             Lee Ji-sun