Samsung Electronics has revealed its top five clients during the third quarter of 2020.
Samsung’s five major customers in the third quarter were Apple, Best Buy, Deutsche Telekom, Tektronix Hong Kong and Verizon. They accounted 13 percent of the company’s total sales.

Samsung had listed China’s Huawei Technologies as one of its five major customers in the first half of the year.

Samsung said its research and development (R&D) spending for the first nine months of the year hit a record high of $14.3 billion amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

The figure represented a 600 billion-won increase from a year earlier, and is a more than 5 trillion won increase from its R&D investment tally in the first half of the year, reports Yonhap news agency.

Samsung’s R&D investment was equivalent to 9.1 percent of its sales.

Samsung registered 4,974 patents in South Korea and 6,321 patents in the United States in the third quarter of the year.

The South Korean tech titan has registered 194,643 patents globally, with 77,016 patents registered in the US.

Samsung’s total capital expenditure reached 25.5 trillion won, up 52 percent from a year ago, in the first nine months of the year.

Samsung expected its capital expenditure for this year to reach 35.2 trillion won, which would be the first time since 2017 for its yearly capital expenditure to surpass the 30-trillion won mark.

The number of Samsung employees in South Korea soared to a record high of 108,998 as of the third quarter, up about 3,700 from last December.