What Samsung told the market
Samsung Electronics issued third-quarter earnings guidance on Thursday 8 October: consolidated sales of about 195 trillion won and consolidated operating profit of about 107.40 trillion won. It is the first time the company has guided above 100 trillion won of quarterly operating profit.
The comparison figures are in the same release. In the second quarter of 2026 Samsung reported sales of 171.5 trillion won and operating profit of 89.49 trillion won. In the third quarter of 2025 it reported 86.06 trillion won and 12.17 trillion won. Profit is therefore up about 20% on the previous quarter and roughly 8.8 times what it was a year earlier, on sales that have more than doubled.
Korean disclosure rules do not allow an earnings estimate to be published as a range, so the headline figure is the median of one. Samsung’s stated ranges are 194 trillion to 196 trillion won of sales and 107.3 trillion to 107.5 trillion won of operating profit.
What the guidance does not say
It does not say where the money came from. The guidance is consolidated and carries no divisional split. That arrives with the full report later in October.
The omission matters this quarter, because the two halves of Samsung are moving in opposite directions. Analysts surveyed by Seoul Economic Daily before the release averaged 200.26 trillion won of sales and 105.41 trillion won of operating profit. Samsung came in about 2 trillion won above that profit estimate and about 5 trillion won below the sales estimate — the signature of a quarter carried by margin rather than by volume.
Analysts quoted in the same report project an operating margin of roughly 75% for Device Solutions, Samsung’s semiconductor arm, and more than 80% for the memory business on its own. The Device eXperience division, which sells phones and home appliances, was expected to extend the weakness it showed in the second quarter.
Memory prices, not AI products
Samsung does not sell an AI model. It sells the memory that AI systems are assembled out of, and that market has been repricing all year.
PC DRAM averaged $26 in September, up a dollar from August and an all-time high, according to DRAMeXchange figures cited by Seoul Economic Daily. NAND flash for memory cards and USB drives averaged $30.6, a twenty-first consecutive monthly rise. TrendForce projects commodity DRAM prices rising 10% to 15% quarter on quarter in the fourth quarter, and NAND 15% to 20%.
Samsung was also the first manufacturer to mass-produce HBM4, the sixth generation of high-bandwidth memory. Kim Dong-won, head of research at KB Securities, said Samsung’s HBM4 contracts have a strong chance of being signed at the highest price among the three DRAM makers, and noted that because HBM supply contracts are typically annual, this year’s higher commodity prices have not yet fully reached selling prices.
What to watch
The full third-quarter report, due later this month, with the divisional breakdown. Two figures in it will matter: what Device Solutions actually earned, and what Samsung says about memory supply into 2027. A company guiding to 107 trillion won while its consumer division struggles is not a diversified electronics group having a good quarter. It is a memory maker in a shortage.
