Samsung Electronics announced an operating profit forecast of approximately 107.4 trillion won (roughly 80.2 billion dollars) for the third quarter, making it the most profitable quarter ever for a tech firm and the first to top the 100-trillion-won mark in a single quarter for a South Korean company.
Preliminary estimates released Tuesday, October 8 showed an increase of 782.5 percent on the 12.17 trillion won the company booked in the same quarter last year. Revenue was seen reaching around 195 trillion won, 126.6 percent higher than 86.06 trillion won seen in the same period last year. Both figures would be company records and it would be the fourth straight quarter of record operating income. Earnings were slightly above the consensus of 106.1 trillion won, compiled by LSEG and quoted by Reuters.
It’s driven by a demand for memory chips in artificial-intelligence systems. Competitive supply has supported all sorts of high-bandwidth memory, from the traditional DRAM and NAND to HBM: spending on data centers has exceeded chip output growth and prices have exploded.
Samsung, the world’s largest memory chip producer, began to ship HBM4 and anticipated supply shortfalls continuing until 2028 a scenario Micron agrees with. Based on analysts, the semiconductor division will be the largest contributor to earnings growth, despite certain global headwinds, like increasing component prices and shrinking margins in the smartphone and other consumer electronics markets.
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That would be bigger than the $63.7 billion Nvidia reported in quarterly operating income recently and larger than Samsung’s own previous high, a gain of 89.49 trillion won in the second quarter. On a quarter-by-quarter basis, that’s been roughly 20% in operating profit and roughly 14% in sales since then.
Operating profit for the first nine months of 2026 already has come to almost 254 trillion won, more than 10x the year-previous figure, and several domestic brokerages are forecasting the total profit for 2026 to top 300 trillion won, with bigger figures in store for 2027 if the shortage endures.
Samsung cautioned the results are the midpoints of an estimated band of 194 trillion to 196 trillion won in sales and 107.3 trillion to 107.5 trillion won in operating profit under Korean disclosure rules that call for a single number rather than a range. A full set of figures, including a breakdown by division and net income, are to be announced on Oct. 29. In early Seoul trade, the shares were virtually unchanged.
