Samsung Electronics expects to report the biggest quarterly profit in its history. In preliminary guidance released on October 8, the South Korean company said third-quarter operating profit came to about 107.4 trillion won, roughly $80 billion, up from 12.17 trillion won a year earlier. That is an increase of close to nine times and makes Samsung the first South Korean company to earn more than 100 trillion won in a single quarter, according to TrendForce.
The numbers
- Operating profit: about 107.4 trillion won, up around 783 percent year on year and above the LSEG SmartEstimate of 106.1 trillion won.
- Revenue: about 195 trillion won, up roughly 127 percent.
- Prior quarter: 89.49 trillion won of operating profit on 171.5 trillion won of sales.
- Streak: the fourth record quarter in a row.
Full results, including a breakdown by division, are due on October 29.
What is driving the surge
The story is memory chips. Data centres training and running artificial intelligence models need enormous amounts of DRAM and storage, and supply has not kept pace. That imbalance has pushed up prices for standard DRAM and NAND flash, while demand for high-bandwidth memory, the specialised stacks that sit beside AI processors, keeps climbing. One analyst estimated Samsung’s HBM shipments rose close to 50 percent from the previous quarter.
Industry forecasts suggest AI infrastructure demand will outpace memory supply until at least 2027. Analysts cited by Korean media expect the chip division to generate nearly all of Samsung’s profit this quarter, with an estimate of around 110 trillion won, implying that other parts of the business lost money.
The flip side for phones and TVs
The same price surge that is enriching Samsung’s chip business is squeezing its consumer products. Higher memory costs are eating into margins on smartphones and televisions, and earlier in October the company raised Galaxy S26 prices by $100 in the United States and South Korea.
Samsung is not alone. Research firms have warned all year that the memory crunch would raise device prices and thin out entry-level models. Gartner has estimated that memory prices for phones and PCs could more than double by the end of 2026 compared with 2025, and IDC has forecast steep drops in global smartphone and PC shipments this year.
What it means
For investors, Samsung’s guidance confirms that the AI build-out is now the dominant force in the semiconductor industry. For consumers, it is a signal that the next phone or laptop is likely to cost more, or come with less memory, than it would have a year ago. Follow chips and devices in our Tech section and markets in our Finance section.