Samsung shares fall as record Q3 profit misses lofty expectations
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (KS:005930) forecast its strongest ever third-quarter profit on Thursday amid robust AI-fueled demand for memory chips, although the print still came in a shade below the higher end of market expectations.
Samsung shares fell 1.6% in volatile trade, dragging the KOSPI index down 1.5%. Rival SK Hynix Inc (KS:000660) shed 1.2%.
The world’s largest memory chip maker announced a preliminary operating profit of about 107.40 trillion won ($80.1 billion) for the three months to September 30.
The figure was up nearly tenfold from the 12.2 trillion won profit seen a year ago, but slightly missed Bloomberg forecasts of 108.67 trillion won. Operating profit, however, came in just above LSEG estimates of 106.1 trillion won.
Third quarter sales more than doubled to 195 trillion won from 86.06 trillion won a year ago, Samsung said in a press release. The company clocked its fourth straight quarter of record profits.
The strong year-on-year surge in earnings came amid outsized artificial intelligence demand for advanced memory. The company, along with rivals SK Hynix Inc (KS:000660) and Micron, is a key supplier of high bandwidth memory to AI chipmaker NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA).
Advances in AI spurred increasing demand for computational power, which in turn fueled more demand for advanced memory chips, sharply tightening supplies and ramping up prices– a trend that greatly benefited Samsung and its peers.
Samsung will release detailed results on October 29. Chips are expected to be the biggest driver of earnings, while its smartphone and consumer electronics divisions are expected to have faced mounting pressure from rising component costs.
A stronger South Korean won may also have weighed on the company’s earnings by diminishing the value of overseas sales.
Samsung’s earnings come just a week after Micron also clocked bumper quarterly earnings, and signaled that AI-fueled tightness in memory supplies was likely to continue well into 2027.
But some doubts over AI-driven demand emerged in recent weeks amid growing public pushback against new data center constructions in the United States.
A Heatmap News report showed at least $260 billion of data center investments were canceled in 2026, with the pace of cancellations seen picking up through the September quarter amid disruptions in funding and energy supplies.
