Markets
Samsung Earned a Record ₩107 Trillion, and Its Shares Fell
Samsung Electronics confirmed record quarterly operating profit of 107.4 trillion won on Thursday, the first tech company above 100 trillion in a quarter. Its shares still fell more than 6% in Seoul as results came in slightly below forecasts and Alphabet's slide weighed on AI stocks.
Samsung Electronics confirmed on Thursday, October 29, a quarter that would have been hard to imagine two years ago. Consolidated revenue was 195.3 trillion won, up 14% from the second quarter, and operating profit 107.4 trillion won, which Samsung said made it the world's first technology company to exceed 100 trillion won of operating profit in a single quarter. The Korea Times put the increase from a year earlier at 783%. The figures matched the preliminary estimate the company published on October 8.
Nearly all of it came from chips. The Device Solutions division earned 106.5 trillion won on revenue of 147.1 trillion, with memory setting records on sales of high-bandwidth memory and server SSDs. On the earnings call, according to an Investing.com transcript, the company said HBM4 sales more than tripled from the second quarter and made up about 60% of its HBM sales, that the memory market should stay tight through 2028, and that ten major customers have signed multi-year HBM supply contracts, with ten more in talks. The rest of the group lost money: the mobile and networks business had an operating loss of 0.6 trillion won and TVs and appliances 0.2 trillion.
Samsung is also paying shareholders on a new scale. It declared a quarterly dividend of 4,601 won a share, about 30 trillion won in total, and estimated total returns for 2026 at 90 to 110 trillion won, of which 35 trillion is already planned or completed; the rest will include a large buyback and cancellation programme and further dividends, with details due in late January. Capital spending rose to 29 trillion won in the quarter, almost all of it on semiconductors, and is expected to reach about 84.4 trillion won for the year.
None of that stopped the shares from falling. The results were slightly short of analysts' expectations, the Korea Times reported, and the stock was down 6.61% late on Thursday morning, while SK Hynix, which had reported its own record a day earlier, was up 0.4%. The Kospi touched 6,100.11 early in the session and was down 3.01% at 5,831.34 at 11:20 a.m., and the won weakened to 1,333.5 per dollar. Analysts also pointed to Alphabet's after-hours fall in New York, which revived the question of how long the biggest buyers of memory can keep spending at this pace.
The morning showed where the risk in Korea's rally actually sits. Samsung and SK Hynix both say demand will exceed supply for years, and both are returning record amounts of cash. But they carry so much of the Kospi's weight that one disappointing report from a customer in California can take 3% off the whole market before lunch in Seoul. The order books look secure; the concentration of the market that owns them does not.