Samsung Electronics posts 100 trillion won in quarterly profit, a first in Korea

Samsung Electronics’ headquarters in Seoul’s Seocho District. (Yonhap)

Samsung Electronics has become the first company in Korea to surpass 100 trillion won in quarterly operating profit, a milestone that even global tech titans like Apple and Nvidia have yet to reach. The achievement comes thanks to the boom in demand for memory semiconductors fueled by surging investments in artificial intelligence.

Samsung Electronics on Thursday released its preliminary earnings numbers for the third quarter, reporting revenue of 195 trillion won and operating profit of 107.4 trillion won. 

100 trillion won is approximately US$74.6 billion.

Revenue skyrocketed 126.6% year on year while operating profit ballooned an astronomical 782.5%. Both figures easily surpassed previous quarterly records, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of record-breaking performance since the final quarter of last year.

Operating profit in the third quarter stood out given that it came close to matching the company’s combined 126.3 trillion won in operating profit over the four years from 2022 to 2025 (43.4 trillion won in 2022, 6.6 trillion won in 2023, 32.7 trillion won in 2024, and 43.6 trillion won last year).

No other company worldwide has hit operating profit in the range of 100 trillion won except the Saudi oil giant Aramco, which raked in US$86.5 billion (116 trillion won at the time) in the second quarter of 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Unsurprisingly, semiconductors drove the earnings bonanza. Samsung Electronics does not release results by sector in its preliminary earnings announcement, but domestic brokerages estimate that its massive operating profit from the memory business within the semiconductor division offset losses in foundry and System LSI, as well as in finished products like mobile and home appliances.

Rising memory prices fueled by surging demand from the expansion of large-scale AI data centers are believed to have driven the improvement in earnings.

The pace of operating profit growth slowed, however, as quarter-on-quarter expansion declined from 184.6% in the first quarter to 56.5% in the second and 20% in the third. Industry insiders attributed the slowdown to the sheer scale of the company’s profits and the difficulty of rapidly expanding production capacity, as its memory chip plants are already operating at full capacity

Another factor cited was the won's rise in value against the greenback.