Seoul, Nov 17 (IANS): Samsung Electronics has 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 per cent of its sales.

Samsung said on Monday that it registered a total of 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.

In the first nine months of the year, Samsung's total capital expenditure reached 25.5 trillion won, up 52 per cent from a year ago.

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.

The report showed that Samsung's five major customers in the third quarter were Apple, Best Buy, Deutsche Telekom, Tektronix Hong Kong and Verizon. They accounted 13 per cent of the company's total sales.

In the first half of the year, Huawei was listed as one of Samsung's five major customers, but the Chinese tech firm apparently dropped off the list following US sanctions in the third quarter.