Samsung Electronics said Thursday it expects third-quarter operating profit of about 107.4 trillion won, roughly $80 billion, up 782.5 percent from 12.17 trillion won a year earlier and about 20 percent above the second quarter. Consolidated sales are estimated at about 195 trillion won, up 126.6 percent year on year. Both figures are company records, and the profit figure edged past the LSEG SmartEstimate of 106.1 trillion won by about 1.2 percent.
The guidance carries no division breakdown, so the memory reading is inference, but it is the consensus inference. High-bandwidth memory and conventional DRAM and NAND for AI servers are the profit engine, with Micron posting similar gains last week and SK hynix reporting later this month. The implied operating margin is about 55 percent, against 14.1 percent a year ago. Third-quarter profit alone already exceeds Samsung’s entire 2025 full-year total of 43.6 trillion won, and the nine-month cumulative stands at 254.13 trillion won, putting full-year profit comfortably above 300 trillion won on current momentum.
The market shrugged anyway. Samsung shares fell about 0.7 to 0.9 percent on the news, the classic sign of a record that was already priced in. The more interesting signal is forward: Reuters reports both Samsung and Micron expect memory supply to stay tight through 2028. Samsung warned earlier this year that the crunch would deepen in 2027 and could persist through 2028, which keeps pricing power with the producers and keeps squeezing the buyers of everyday electronics, where rising component costs are already pricing budget PCs out of the market.
The risks to the print are the ones Reuters flags: rising costs, intensifying Chinese competition, and potential US semiconductor tariffs. None of that shows up in a guidance note. The division split and HBM contribution land with the full report on October 29.