Share still loses: Samsung makes gigantic profits

The Korean technology group Samsung is benefiting enormously from the increased prices for memory chips. The company increases its operating profit almost ninefold, a record result. Investors are still disappointed.

Thanks to the massive increase in the price of memory chips, the electronics giant Samsung Electronics achieved record results in the third quarter. According to preliminary figures, operating profit rose to around 107 trillion Korean won (71 billion euros), almost nine times the value of a year earlier, as the South Korean group announced in Suwon.

Sales were approximately 195 trillion won (around 130 billion euros), more than double. However, the company, which competes with Apple in the cell phone business, did not do as well as investors had hoped with both values. The share lost almost two percent in Seoul.

In the current year, however, the stock has more than doubled its value and, as a heavyweight, has significantly supported the AI-fueled rally on the South Korean stock market. Samsung is the largest memory chip manufacturer in the world. Competitor SK Hynix also comes from South Korea and has gained even more significantly on the stock market in 2026. Together, the two companies account for a large part of the South Korean stock market with a good half of the market capitalization of the leading Kospi index.

The boom among memory chip manufacturers is primarily explained by the hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI). The rapid expansion of AI data centers is devouring massive amounts of IT hardware including memory chips. Particularly fast HBM chips (High Bandwidth Memory) are in demand. The prices of memory chips have also risen rapidly overall. Samsung will present the detailed figures for the quarter on October 29th.