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US President Joe Biden holds up a semiconductor wafer as he participates virtually in the CEO Summit on Semiconductor and Supply Chain Resilience from the White House on April 12, 2021. (AP/Yonhap News)

A new survey has found that only two of the world’s top tech companies are based in South Korea and that the country’s tech industry is tilted toward hardware.

According to the results of a study released on Tuesday by the Federation of Korean Industries (FKI), the world’s top 100 tech companies in terms of market capitalization include two from Korea: Samsung Electronics (9th) and SK Hynix (56th). The FKI’s survey was based on S&P Capital IQ, a database that analyzes corporations from around the world.

The US had the most companies in the top 100, with 56, followed by China (9), Japan (8), India (4), the Netherlands (4), and Taiwan (3).

Broadening the survey to the top 200 companies by market cap, three more Korean companies make the list: Samsung SDI (114th), Naver (120th) and Kakao (133rd). That long list included 27 companies from China, 17 from Japan and 6 from Taiwan.

When the focus is narrowed to the semiconductor industry, Korea has two companies in the top 100: SK Hynix (11th) and SK Square (63rd), an investment firm that is the parent company of SK Hynix.

Adding Samsung Electronics, which is categorized as a technology hardware firm, would bring that tally to three.

The world’s top 100 semiconductor companies include 41 from China, 31 from the US and 15 from Taiwan. Zooming out to the top 200 admits a few more Korean companies: DB Hitek (132nd), Leeno Industrial (140th), LX Semicon (153rd) and Simmtech (185th).

When the world’s top 100 tech companies were broken down into categories, semiconductor companies had the biggest presence, followed by app software companies, data services companies, system software companies and IT consulting companies.

The FKI said it had left telecoms out of the rankings because they tend to function as national infrastructure and are therefore less useful for international comparisons.

When the top five sectors are compared before and after COVID-19, the hardware and storage sector (including the likes of Samsung Electronics and Apple) dropped from 4th to 9th place in the rankings, giving up its spot to the system software sector (including Adobe and Zoom).

Korea had two of the top 100 companies in the system software sector: namely, Douzone Bizon (74th) and AhnLab (82nd). The US had 34 companies in that sector, China had 32, Israel 6 and Japan 5.

“Trends that have been evident since the outbreak of the pandemic include the passing of the age of hardware, the growing competitiveness of software, and the acceleration of the digital transformation. Since Korean tech companies are still focused on manufacturing hardware such as electronic parts and semiconductors, their position is expected to weaken as [the industry] is reorganized around software competitiveness,” the FKI said.

By Kim Hoe-seung, senior staff writer

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