Samsung Electronics’ top executives have held crisis talks to discuss ways to deal with the worsening global business environment that has followed South Korea’s chip exports plunge.

The meeting was held as reports revealed a 30.5 per cent decline in South Korean semiconductor exports for May.

The declines have been blamed on worsening US/China trade tensions and a gloomy global economic outlook.

The chairman of the world’s biggest memory-chipmaker, Sang Hoon Lee, told the meeting that Samsung is facing a rapidly changing business environment. He called for continued investment to secure a long-term lead in technology.

Falling chip sales have led Samsung to announce its worst operating profit in years.

The company was also hit recently by another embarrassing hardware failure: this time of its foldable phones that have been indefinitely sidelined following huge problems encountered by journalists conducting early reviews of the folding devices.