Samsung has acquired Dutch display technology firm Liquavista for an undisclosed sum as it seeks to ramp up its presence in the market for advanced display technology for mobile devices.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Samsung closed the deal last month but only announced it last Thursday.
Liquavista, which was part of Philips Research Labs until 2006, offers a type of electronic display technology known as electrowetting, which is used in e-readers, mobile phones, media players and other mobile devices.
The company is backed by several investors including Amadeus Capital and US semiconductor firm Applied Materials.
"In e-paper applications, the response time of electrowetting displays will be more than 70 times faster than that of existing reflective displays, allowing for color videos, which was previously thought impossible," Samsung said in a statement. It added that displays using electrowetting consume just 10 percent of the battery power of existing display technologies.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal reflects Samsung's efforts to grab a larger share of the fast growing e-reader market, currently dominated by Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle.
It is also not the first time that Samsung has acquired a display firm; in 2008 it acquired the intellectual-property assets of US-based Clairvoyante, an IP-licensing company responsible for the development of subpixel-rendering display technology.
Samsung is reportedly set to spend a record KRW43.1 trillion (US$38 billion) during 2011 in order to bolster its development of next-generation technologies, including a significant investment in OLED screens as used in smartphones such as the Galaxy S.
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