Samsung Electronics has confirmed the largest quarterly profit in its history, and almost all of it came from chips. Third quarter revenue reached 195.25 trillion won, up 126.9 percent from a year earlier and a fourth consecutive quarterly record, while operating profit rose 783.1 percent to 107.44 trillion won, the first time any technology company has cleared 100 trillion won of operating profit in a single quarter. The operating margin was 55.0 percent, and net profit reached 75.1 trillion won.
The split inside the group is stark. The Device Solutions semiconductor division posted revenue of 147.1 trillion won and operating profit of 106.5 trillion won, roughly 99 percent of the group total and about 15 times its level a year earlier. Memory revenue alone was 140.7 trillion won, up 427 percent year on year, driven by high bandwidth memory and server memory for AI data centres. The Device eXperience division, covering smartphones, televisions and appliances, lifted revenue 8 percent from the prior quarter to 52.1 trillion won but recorded an operating loss of 0.8 trillion won, its second consecutive quarterly deficit, squeezed in part by the same rising memory costs that are enriching the chip division.
Management told investors the constraint is supply, not demand. Samsung said its 2027 high bandwidth memory supply is effectively sold out and that it expects AI driven demand to remain stronger than supply into 2027. Full year capital expenditure is put at about 84.4 trillion won, including 76.8 trillion won for the semiconductor division, up 62 percent, with spending set to rise sharply again next year. EE Times, citing Counterpoint Research, reported DRAM operating margins of 79 percent and NAND margins of 72 percent, with standard DRAM pricing up from a historical 20 to 30 cents per gigabit to about 2 dollars per gigabit.
The market reaction cut the other way. Samsung shares fell as much as 6.2 percent in Seoul after the results, even as the headline numbers beat the guidance the company gave on October 8. Net profit of 75.1 trillion won landed below the roughly 86 trillion won consensus cited in post results coverage, and the detailed plan for the balance of a shareholder return policy of up to 110 trillion won was deferred to a board meeting in late January.
Read against Friday’s semiconductor selloff in the United States, the print separates two questions the market has been pricing as one. Demand for AI memory is not softening: it is rationed, priced at record margins, and sold out a year forward. What sold off was the funding side of the buildout among the buyers of that memory. Samsung sits on the receiving end of the spending that Alphabet, Amazon and Meta were punished for making.