❯ Samsung Electronics estimates third-quarter operating profit at 107.4 trillion won, the first Korean company to top 100 trillion won in a quarter

More than twice last year, in one quarterSamsung Electronics released preliminary third-quarter results on October 8: operating profit of 107.4 trillion won (about $80.28 billion), up 782.5% from a year earlier, on revenue of 195 trillion won, up 126.6%. According to The Korea Times, it is the first time a Korean company has exceeded 100 trillion won in quarterly operating profit.

Profit beat, revenue missedOperating profit came in above the market consensus of 106.64 trillion won, while revenue fell short of the 200.64 trillion won expected. SBS reports that Samsung’s full-year 2025 operating profit was 43.6 trillion won, so this single quarter is nearly 2.5 times that, and the first nine months of this year total 254.1 trillion won. Final results are due later this month.

Almost all of it from memoryPreliminary results do not break out divisions. The Korea Times estimates the memory business contributed about 110 trillion won, driven by full-scale shipments of HBM4 for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform and DRAM prices that kept rising at double-digit rates. HBM is the high-bandwidth memory paired with AI accelerator chips. SBS estimates the DX division, home to phones and appliances, lost money for a second straight quarter, and that foundry and system chips lost about 1 trillion won.

Chip buyers pay the billThe other side of rising memory prices is downstream cost. Forecasts cited by SBS put fourth-quarter DRAM prices up another 10% to 15% and NAND up 15% to 20%. For makers that need memory for servers, phones and PCs, that cost shows no sign of easing soon.

▮ SIGNALNearly all of Samsung’s profit comes from memory while phones and appliances lose money, so even inside one company the AI boom has a side that collects and a side that pays.