Samsung Electronics Co earned a far stronger-than-expected eightfold leap in quarterly profit, underscoring robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory chips in the face of markets roiled by war in the Middle East.
Customers led by cloud service providers are ramping up orders for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and other chips used in data centers to feed AI services, lifting volumes and margins at the chips-to-smartphones conglomerate.
Samsung reported preliminary operating profit of 57.2 trillion won (US$38.2 billion) in the first quarter — up 755 percent to hit a record — versus analysts’ average projection for 39.3 trillion won. Revenue climbed to 133 trillion won, against the average estimate of 116.8 trillion won. The company is to release a full financial statement including net income and divisional breakdowns on April 30.
Samsung dominates global memory supply along with SK Hynix Inc and Micron Technology Inc. The trio has increasingly shifted production in the past few years toward HBM used in Nvidia Corp’s AI accelerators, tightening supply of conventional memory.
The first-quarter operating profit dwarfs Samsung’s performance in other quarters and blew past the 43.6 trillion won the company generated in all of last year. South Korea’s semiconductor exports — a bellwether of global technology demand — soared 151.4 percent last month to a record US$32.8 billion, the South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources reported last week.
Analysts remain upbeat on South Korea’s biggest company, largely dismissing concerns about AI optimization by offerings such as Google’s TurboQuant or Anthropic PBC’s Claude Mythos.
