Samsung Electronics has became the world’s first company to top 100 trillion won in a quarterly operating profit among global tech companies, opened an era for the Korean powerhouse company.
The latest feat came after Samsung Electronics ranked first, surpassing NVIDIA and Apple by posting 89 trillion won in operating profit in the second quarter of this year.
The Korean tech giant made the unprecedented achievement of topping 100 trillion won in Q3 operating profit.
In an electronic notice issued by Samsung Electronics on Oct. 8, provisional figures showed that the Q3 operating profit was tallied at 107.4 trillion won.
The figure represents a 782.5 percent year-on-year jump over the same period of last year.
The company saw Q3 sales surge 126.6 percent year-on-year to 195 trillion won, its best-ever business performance.
The deepening of a memory chip supply shortage, caused by the proliferation of AI, pushed up general DRAM prices sharply.
In the advanced memory sector, such as the high bandwidth memory, in which Samsung Electronics lagged behind SK Hynix, the former saw related sales surge.
Reuters predicts that Samsung Electronics and NVIDIA will post $283 billion and $268 billion in operating profit for the year 2026, respectively.
The 107.4 trillion won Samsung Electronics posted in Q3 operating profit for the July-September period translates into earning 1.17 trillion won on a daily basis.
Samsung Electronics’ Q3 operating profit accounts for 75 percent of the combined operating profit of 633 listed companies, except Samsung Electronics.
Prof. Kim Sung-jae of Seoul National University Engineering College said, “Samsung Electronics’ latest business performance is owed to favorable market conditions such as the AI boom and memory price surge, but it cannot be explained only with business market changes.”
Samsung Electronics’ investments into super-precision processes and equipment even in a recession period and building the world’s largest manufacturing foundation has served as a driving force to transfer explosive AI demand into significant operating profit, he said.
Samsung Electronics’ topping 100 trillion won in Q3 operating profit for the first time came after the Korean tech company earned over 50 trillion won in Q1 operating profit and 89.4 trillion won in Q2 operating profit.
The operating profit jump is primarily attributable to a surge in DRAM prices.
Industry sources analyzed that Samsung Electronics saw average DRAM prices jump more than 20 percent compared to the previous quarter.
Memory manufacturers have concentrated their production capabilities on producing HBMs and high-capacity DRAMs, causing a supply shortage of general DRAMs in use for PC and smartphones.
Samsung Electronics began to benefit from the business that HBMs used for AI servers.
The company handed over its HDM hegemony to SK Hynix after the former belatedly made HBM investments at an early stage of the AI boom.
But Samsung Electronics saw HBM sales increase after the company commercialized the sixth-generation HBM4 for the first time in the world last February.
The company saw cumulative HBM4 sales top $1 billion in June four months after the version made its debut.
Q3 HBM4 sales are analyzed to surge over three times more than the previous quarter.
The surging HBM4 sales have begun to give a leg-up to the struggling foundry business.
Samsung Electronics has been producing base dies using its own 4-nano foundry process.
The base die is the semiconductor located at the bottom of HBM, which stacks multiple layers of DRAM, and is directly connected to the GPU through circuitry.
Semiconductors have so fare produced on the memory manufacturing processes.
As a result, as HBM4 sales have increased, the foundry production lines tend to be more humming.
Samsung Electronics has been evaluated to be struggling with a structure as an integrated device manufacturer, but a shift of the HDM market into a HBM4-based one now serves as one of the the company’s “weapons” to compete with its rivals.
The company has seen its memory business earn a huge operating profit, but the non-memory LSI and foundry businesses struggle with a few trillion in losses.
But such a structure now has a synergetic effect on the HBM4 business, requiring DRAM and advanced logic processes.
Business prospects for next year are predicted to be brighter. Samsung Electronics is predicted to see Q4 operating profit surpass Q3 operating profit.
The company is forecast to see next year’s operating profit surpass 500 trillion won.
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