By Kim Hyun-bin

Major conglomerates have been emphasizing the need for investment diversification during their regular general shareholders' meetings, vowing to strengthen growth engines through mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

SK hynix Vice Chairman Park Jung-ho met with reporters after a regular shareholders' meeting held last week and said, "We are discussing ways to jointly invest with other companies for an M&A deal concerning Arm."

SK hynix Vice Chairman Park Jung-ho

A world-class U.K. semiconductor design company, Arm is an intellectual property seller that makes basic semiconductor designs and provides them to manufacturing companies for royalties. Arm's blueprint is used in the application processors of 90 percent of smartphones worldwide and 85 percent of tablets.

If SK hynix jointly acquires Arm, it can take control of its core technologies. The largest shareholder of Arm is SoftBank of Japan.

SK hynix already signed an acquisition agreement last October with Key Foundry, an 8-inch foundry semiconductor consignment production company, and completed the first acquisition of Intel's NAND division for $9 billion in December.

Investment and business diversification have also been popping up as major issues at the shareholders' meetings.

"We will diversify our investment portfolio into mobility and future technology-based industries," Cho Hyun-bum, chairman of Hankook & Company, said during his company's shareholders' meeting last week.

Hankook & Company announced a new business development plan to acquire a stake in Preciseley Microtechnology, a Canadian micro-precision machinery company.

Preciseley Microtechnology specializes in the design of optical microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), which are used for LiDAR, 5G optical communication network, autonomous driving and medical imaging equipment.

Through the acquisition, Hankook & Company plans to expand to solutions and parts for autonomous vehicles, including optical communication parts.

LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo also announced that his group will focus on upgrading its business portfolio this year.

LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo

"We have upgraded our business portfolio by reorganizing our non-core businesses and focusing our capabilities on growth engines, and are increasing our competitiveness for future growth, such as through artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation," Koo said.

"We will continue to focus on accelerating the qualitative growth of our core businesses and discovering new future growth engines such as AI, sustainability and healthcare."

These companies aim at strengthening future growth engines by expanding through M&As and investment diversification.

Many experts say that uncertain external conditions, such as the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain instability due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, have also spurred companies to jump into new sectors.