Every so often a company posts a number so large it is hard to take in. Samsung Electronics managed exactly that on Tuesday, forecasting a 19-fold jump in second-quarter operating profit from a year earlier, its third consecutive quarter of record operating profit, as AI-driven demand continued to lift memory chip prices. The world's largest memory chipmaker put April-to-June operating profit at 89.4 trillion won, or about $58.44 billion, comfortably ahead of the 87.3 trillion won analysts had pencilled in, and a world away from the 4.7 trillion won it made in the same stretch a year earlier. By most counts, it is the largest quarterly operating profit any technology company has ever reported.
To put the scale in perspective, that single quarter surpassed Samsung's combined operating profit for the three years from 2023 through 2025. Revenue was expected to rise 129% to 171 trillion won from a year earlier. There is even a suggestion the real figure is bigger still: the guidance is understood to include a bonus provision in the tens of trillions of won, and strip that out and underlying operating profit would have cleared 100 trillion won, according to the Seoul Economic Daily.
What is driving the boom
The short answer is the global scramble for chips to run artificial intelligence. Memory prices kept climbing through the quarter as AI spending broadened beyond high-bandwidth memory, the premium chips built for data centres, into conventional memory chips used in everyday devices. The shift shows up in the pricing. Citi Research last week said average selling prices for two of the most common memory chip types rose 44% and 53% quarter-on-quarter in the second quarter. When prices move like that and you happen to be the biggest supplier in the world, the profit follows.
Why the shares still fell
Here is the twist. Despite the record, Samsung shares fell more than 6% on the day, a bout of profit-taking after a rally that had priced much of the good news in already. In other words, the market had been expecting brilliance, so brilliance alone was not quite enough to keep pushing the stock higher.
Samsung has said it plans to announce detailed results on July 30, including a breakdown of earnings for each of its business divisions. That is where the fuller picture will emerge, and where investors will look to see whether this once-in-a-cycle memory boom has further to run or is already nearing its peak.
