South Korea's top conglomerate Samsung Group has been increasing expenditures in research and development projects in its technology affiliates, data showed Wednesday, in an apparent bid to foster new growth engines amid sluggish performances.
  

Samsung Electronics Co., Samsung's mainstay unit, allocated 15.3 trillion won (US$14 billion) for R&D last year, which accounted for 7.4 percent of its revenue, industry data showed. The figure marks a 1.5 percentage point rise from 5.9 percent posted two years earlier, when it spent 11.8 trillion won.
  

Boosted by such efforts, Samsung Electronics applied for 7,574 patents in South Korea and 14,343 overseas last year. It also won 4,952 patent rights in the United States in 2014, marking the second-most amount after IBM.
  

Samsung's bid to expand research apparently came as it struggled to find new sources of profit and its traditional mainstay smartphone business continued to remain lackluster amid the rise of Chinese rivals.
  

Other Samsung tech sisters also raced to increase such spending, with Samsung Display Co. using 1.4 trillion won, or 5.8 percent of its revenue on R&D last year, up 550 billion won from a year earlier.
  

Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co. also spent 7.9 percent of its revenue on research last year.
  

LG Group also expanded such spending, with LG Electronics Inc. using 6.2 percent of its revenue, or 3.66 trillion won, on R&D projects, compared with the 3.08 trillion won posted two years earlier.
  

LG Display saw its R&D spending reach 1.7 trillion won in 2014, which accounted for 6.8 percent of its revenue and was up 2.1 percentage points from two years earlier. That of LG Innotek Co., an electronics parts maker, edged up 0.2 percentage point over the cited period to 6.5 percent. (Yonhap)