IANS | 30 Apr, 2024
Samsung Electronics said on Tuesday its operating profit went up more
than ten-fold in the first quarter, with its chip business shifting to
the black for the first time in five quarters.
Samsung
Electronics, the world's largest maker of smartphones and memory chips,
said its operating profit reached 6.6 trillion won (US$4.8 billion) for
the January-March period, compared with 640.2 billion won a year ago.
Its
sales jumped 12.8 per cent to 71.9 trillion won, and net profit soared
329 percent to 6.75 trillion won, the company said in a regulatory
filing.
The earnings beat market expectations. The average
estimate of operating profit by analysts stood at 5.6 trillion won,
according to a survey by Yonhap Infomax, the financial data firm of
Yonhap News Agency.
Samsung said it has invested 7.82 trillion won
in research and development for the quarter ending March, marking the
largest quarterly investment.
The chip business earned 23.1
trillion won in sales for the three-month period through March, with an
operating profit of 1.91 trillion won.
It is the first time that
the company's semiconductor segment has posted profit since the fourth
quarter of 2022. It logged an operating loss of over 15 trillion won
last year amid a downturn in the global chip market.
Strong demand
for memory chips lent support to the better-than-expected performance
of the company's chip business on rising DRAM and NAND flash prices,
with steady sales of double data rate 5 (DDR5) products and massive
solid state drives (SSDs).
The chipmaker said its foundry business
is expected to post a double-digit on-quarter growth in the second
quarter after bottoming out in the first quarter as customer inventory
adjustments have been finalised and line utilisation improved.
Samsung
Electronics plans to complete the development of 2nm design
infrastructure and prepare infrastructure for various applications in
mature processes, such as 14nm and 8nm, to secure customers.
The
mobile and other devices business posted 47.3 trillion won in sales and
4.1 trillion won in operating profit in the first quarter.
In particular, sales of 33.5 trillion won and an operating profit of 2.5 trillion won came from the smartphone sector.
Its
latest Galaxy S24 series model, the company's first AI-powered
smartphone, led the stellar first-quarter earnings despite a slowdown in
the global smartphone market.
The company said shipments of
smartphones and tablets amounted to 60 million and 7 million units in
the first quarter, respectively, with the average selling price of
smartphones reaching $336.
Earnings from its TV business fell from the previous quarter, but demand for large QLED and OLED TVs remained strong.