Samsung Electronics estimated a record third-quarter operating profit of 107.4 trillion won, about $80 billion, which is the first time it has passed 100 trillion won in a quarter, as AI demand lifted memory chip sales and prices.
Samsung Electronics said in its preliminary earnings guidance on 7 October 2026 that its operating profit for the third quarter was an estimated 107.4 trillion won, or about $80.2 billion, according to CNBC, SiliconANGLE and Xinhua. It is the first time that the company’s quarterly operating profit has passed 100 trillion won, and the reports describe it as the fourth consecutive quarter of record operating earnings.
The profit is 782.5% higher than a year earlier, according to the search summaries. Revenue is estimated at about 195 trillion won, up nearly 127% from the same quarter last year. These are preliminary estimates, and Full results, with a breakdown by division, follow the preliminary guidance, but the sources reviewed do not give the date.
The reports attribute the surge to its semiconductor business, which supplies memory chips used in AI servers, data centres, smartphones and computers. Samsung’s shipments of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, measured by capacity, increased by nearly 50% from the previous quarter, according to the summary of the reports. HBM is the stacked memory used alongside AI accelerators.
Prices also rose. The summary says that higher prices for DRAM and NAND flash memory improved profitability across the wider memory business and not only in AI-specific products. That means that ordinary memory chips for phones and computers are also contributing, but the sources reviewed do not give figures for each product line.
The result fits with the other chip results of the same week. TSMC reported a sixth straight record profit on 15 October and ASML reported record quarterly sales on 14 October, as Delima News reports in separate articles, and Nvidia published open designs for AI data centres at the Open Compute Project summit on 12 October.
A headline from TradingKey asks what the outlook is for Micron, Nvidia and memory stocks after Samsung’s profit rose almost eight-fold. The article could not be reviewed, and Delima News draws no conclusion about other companies’ shares from it.
The dollar figure is a conversion at the exchange rate used in the reports, and the won figure is the primary number.
On the figures given, the operating profit is about 55% of the estimated revenue of 195 trillion won, which is Delima News’ own calculation. A margin of that size is unusual for a manufacturer of Samsung’s scale, but the sources reviewed do not comment on it or break down which divisions produced the profit.
The increase from a year earlier is so large because the base was low, as the 782.5% figure implies a year-earlier operating profit of about 12.2 trillion won, which is Delima News’ own calculation from the two figures.
Preliminary guidance of this kind is an early estimate, so the final figures, when Samsung publishes them, may differ somewhat from the numbers quoted here.
Samsung’s full results and its comments on demand for 2027 will show whether the memory cycle is expected to continue.
Image: Samsung’s headquarters (file photo). Photo: Oskar Alexanderson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
