Samsung Electronics reportedly sees 38% profit surge due to strong chip prices

Samsung's strong performance - coming despite it shipping fewer smartphones than in January-March - underscores the stratospheric demand for chips that has depleted stockpiles and filled production capacity.

A Samsung Electronics Co. Digital Plaza store illuminated at dusk in Seoul, South Korea, on Saturday, July 3, 2021. Samsung Electronics will releases its preliminary second quarter earnings on July 7. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg (Bloomberg)

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd likely saw a 38% surge in profit for the April-June quarter thanks to strong chip prices and demand spurred by a pandemic-led consumer appetite for electronics as well as recovering investment in data centres.

Operating profit for the world's biggest memory chip and smartphone maker likely jumped to 11.3 trillion won ($10 billion), according to a Refinitiv SmartEstimate drawn from 20 analysts and weighted toward those who are more consistently accurate.

The South Korean tech giant's strong performance - coming despite it shipping fewer smartphones than in January-March - underscores the stratospheric demand for chips that has depleted stockpiles and filled production capacity.

The result would be up 20% from the first quarter and mark Samsung's highest operating income for the second quarter since 2018. Revenue likely rose 15.4%.

Samsung is scheduled to announce preliminary second-quarter results on Wednesday.

The company's chip division likely benefited from memory chip price hikes that exceeded market estimates, analysts said, while shipments grew as well.

Prices of DRAM chips, widely used in servers, mobile phones and other computing devices, jumped 27% compared to the March quarter, while those of NAND flash chips that serve the data storage market rose 8.6%, according to research provider Trendforce.

Profit also improved at Samsung's chip-contract manufacturing and logic chip design business, partly because operations at its storm-hit Texas factory returned to normal, analysts said.

They estimated the chip division's operating profit in April-June rose about 22% from the year-earlier period to about 6.6 trillion won.

Still, Samsung's smartphone shipments dropped to about 59 million in April-June from about 76 million in the first quarter, according to Shinyoung Investment & Securities, as sales slowed for its latest flagship model, launched in mid-January.

Reduced demand from India, hard hit by the pandemic during the quarter, as well as tight supply for some mobile processor chips may also have affected shipments, analysts said, estimating the mobile business' operating profit at about 2.9 trillion won.