Headquarters of Samsung in Mountain View, California, on October 28, 2018.
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Samsung Electronics reported an over threefold surge in fourth-quarter profits on Thursday, hitting a new record and beating analysts’ estimates, as a memory chip shortage and strong demand for artificial intelligence servers lifted earnings.
Here are Samsung’s fourth-quarter results compared with LSEG SmartEstimate, which is weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:
- Revenue: 93.8 trillion Korean won ($65.58 billion) vs. 93.318 trillion won expected
- Operating profit: 20.1 trillion won vs. 20.018 trillion won expected
The South Korean technology giant’s quarterly revenue rose about 24% from a year earlier to hit a new record. Meanwhile, its operating profit climbed over 200% year over year.
The profits surpassed Samsung’s long-standing record of 17.6 trillion won set in the third quarter of 2018, while matching Samsung’s own guidance of around 20 trillion won.
Samsung, South Korea’s largest company by market capitalization, is a leading provider of memory chips, semiconductor foundry services and smartphones.
The company said in an earnings report that its memory business had helped drive earnings, setting all-time highs for quarterly revenue and operating profit, driven by an overall market price surge, sales of high-bandwidth memory and other high-value-added products.
High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, is a type of memory used in chipsets for AI data centers, and Samsung has shifted more focus to the technology over the past year.
Makers of AI chipsets, such as Nvidia, have been clamoring for limited supplies of HBM, with demand outpacing supply.
As memory companies prioritize capacity to meet that lucrative demand, it has contributed to a shortage across the broader market, pushing up prices of chips used in personal computers and mobile devices.
This has been a boon for memory giants like Samsung as well as its rival SK Hynix, which reported record earnings on Wednesday.
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