Samsung Electronics, South Korea’s largest technology company and the world’s biggest memory chipmaker, has emerged as the dominant leader in the country’s AI competitiveness rankings, but its global standing remains modest compared to U.S. and Chinese tech giants.
According to new data released by corporate research firm CEO Score, a Seoul-based analytics company that tracks management performance and corporate competitiveness among South Korea’s largest businesses, Samsung ranked first in all six evaluation categories—patent citations, patent registrations, academic publications, paper citations, number of AI technical staff, and number of AI-specialized personnel—earning a perfect score of 600 points.
The company recorded 1,079 patent registrations, 1,347 citations, 59 papers at leading global AI conferences, 315 citations of those papers, and a workforce of over 50,000 in AI-related roles.
Naver came in a distant second with 162.9 points, driven by its strong research output of 25 papers and 247 citations.
LG followed with 155.9 points, showing a balanced performance in both patents and academic research, with contributions from both LG AI Research and LG Electronics.
The rest of the top 10 included Krafton, KT, Coupang, Hyundai Motor, Samsung SDS, SK Telecom, and StradVision, an autonomous driving startup.
Industry trends showed manufacturing firms like Samsung, LG, and Hyundai leading, while Naver and Coupang led the internet and platform sectors.
Despite these domestic accomplishments, South Korean companies continue to trail their global peers.
At the world’s top three AI conferences—NeurIPS, ICML, and CVPR—Samsung placed only 12th with 59 papers, while Alphabet led with 820, followed by Microsoft (414), Meta (385), and Amazon (273). Chinese firms like ByteDance (249), Alibaba (235), Tencent (210), and Huawei (198) also outpaced Korean companies. Only Samsung (39th) and Naver (47th) made it into the top 50 for paper citations.
