Samsung’s $80 Billion Profit Left Memory Stocks Lower

Samsung Electronics guided to 107.4 trillion won ($79.89 billion) in third-quarter operating profit, a record that still sent memory stocks lower on Oct. 8. Company-wide sales were about 195 trillion won, short of Visible Alpha’s 205.26 trillion won forecast, while profit came in above LSEG’s 106.1 trillion won SmartEstimate. The print is the first time a technology company has cleared 100 trillion won in quarterly operating profit, and it is larger than Nvidia’s latest $63.73 billion quarter. It still was not enough for the AI memory trade, because the same price spike is already punching holes in Samsung’s phone accounts and in the cloud budgets that pay for the chips.

Full results, with the split between memory and phones, are due on Oct. 29.

Samsung’s $80 Billion Quarter Still Missed the Sales Bar

In its 195 trillion won in quarterly sales guidance, Samsung posted the median of a 194 trillion to 196 trillion won range. Operating profit is the median of 107.3 trillion to 107.5 trillion won. Korean rules bar a range in the headline number, so those medians are what the market traded. Versus the year-ago quarter, sales are up 126.6 percent and operating profit is up 782.5 percent. Versus the second quarter, sales are up 13.7 percent and profit is up 20.0 percent. The operating margin rose to 55.1 percent from 52.2 percent in the second quarter and from 14.1 percent a year earlier.

SAMSUNG’S GUIDED QUARTER VERSUS THE PRIOR TWO

Yonhap Infomax said the profit figure exceeded its average forecast by 1.6 percent, which is why Seoul desks called a beat while some US models, built for a 200 trillion-won-plus top line, called a miss. The won’s move helps explain the sales gap. Samsung collects dollar pay for chip exports, and the won went from about 1,500 per dollar in the second quarter into the 1,300 range in September, which shrinks the won value of the same dollar sales.

This is the fourth straight quarter of record sales and record operating profit, a run that started in the last three months of 2025. Nine-month operating profit is already 254.13 trillion won, against 43.6 trillion won for all of 2025, so one quarter has now outrun last year’s full result. Analysts put the memory unit near 110 trillion won of operating profit. System LSI and foundry are seen with combined losses of about 1 trillion won, with the Texas fab still a cost weight. The consumer businesses are the other hole.

The Same Chips Are Sinking Galaxy Profits

Samsung did not publish division numbers with the guidance. Broker notes and the company’s own half-year filing still sketch a clean split: Device Solutions is minting the record, and Device eXperience, the phones-and-appliances group, is on a second straight quarterly loss. Yonhap put mobile and network operating losses at more than 1.5 trillion won, with visual display and digital appliances around 500 billion won. The Mobile eXperience unit had typically made about 3 trillion won in a third quarter, when new foldables land. It instead booked a 700 billion won loss in the second quarter, its first since the company was founded, and the hole widened in July-September.

HOW THE MEMORY BOOM HITS THE PHONE BUSINESS

• The H1 memory bill: Samsung’s half-year report showed mobile memory purchase prices up 211 percent from last year’s average, while phone selling prices have not kept up.
• The component mix: Counterpoint Research puts memory at 43 percent of a premium phone’s component cost in the third quarter, up from 14 percent a year earlier.
• The shelf price: Samsung raised Galaxy S26 prices by nearly 150,000 won in Korea and $100 to $200 in the United States, after the phones had already been on sale for about seven months.
• The MX hole: Mobile and network units are seen losing more than 1.5 trillion won in the third quarter, after that 700 billion won mobile loss in the second.

Demand is not the break. The Galaxy Z8 series drew 1.44 million preorders in Korea, and Daishin Securities put third-quarter smartphone shipments little changed from a year earlier, with average selling prices up nearly 3 percent. Higher sticker prices still lag the memory bill. The company that sells the chips is now one of the manufacturers paying them, and the phone P&L is where that bill shows up.

Cloud Builders Now Spend Most of Their Budgets on Memory

Hyperscalers sit on the other side of the same invoice. TrendForce’s August note said major cloud service providers’ capital spending is set to jump 98 percent in 2026 and another 50 percent in 2027, and that DRAM and NAND will take a rising share of those budgets because contract prices have run so far, so fast. Server DRAM contract prices rose 64 percent in the second half of 2025 and are seen up about 270 percent across 2026. Enterprise SSD prices rose about 35 percent in that same 2025 stretch and are seen up 235 percent in 2026. Some long-term deals signed from the second quarter of 2026 include price ceilings. Even then, TrendForce still had HBM contracts up 70 to 140 percent in 2027 before it later lifted the blended 2027 HBM average selling price call to a 121 percent increase.

THE MEMORY SHARE OF CLOUD CAPEX

• 2026 share: DRAM and NAND combined are put at 47 percent of major CSP capital spending this year.
• 2027 share: The same firm puts that bill at 68 percent of cloud capital spending next year.
• Server DRAM 2026: Contract prices are seen up about 270 percent across the year, after a 64 percent rise in the second half of 2025.
• Bit mix 2026: HBM and RDIMM together are estimated at 51 percent of DRAM bit supply, crowding out phones and PCs.

That mix has two follow-ons TrendForce flags in the same note. High memory costs give GPU and server vendors cover to raise their own prices, which can force cloud buyers to spend still more to hold chip volumes. Buyers can also shrink memory per box, including thinner RDIMM loads, lower HBM stacks on future accelerators, and more custom silicon with the model baked in. In September it said some GPU and ASIC makers are looking at 8-high HBM stacks instead of 12-high, which uses fewer dies per stack and can spread scarce output across more GPUs, at a 10 to 20 percent price premium per gigabit. The shortage is now writing the system design, not just the invoice.

Double-Digit Price Gains Are Still on the Books

The Oct. 8 tape read as if the cycle had peaked. The contract tape TrendForce published on Sept. 30 still points up, with a slower step in conventional DRAM and a faster one in the parts cloud buyers cannot skip. Conventional DRAM is seen up 10 to 15 percent in the fourth quarter after a 13 to 18 percent rise in the third. NAND is seen up 15 to 20 percent. Enterprise SSDs are the only group where the firm sees the gain speeding up, at 23 to 28 percent, as cloud firms add QLC drives for inference caches and agent workloads. Bit demand for enterprise SSDs is put up more than 80 percent this year.

TRENFORCE PRICE CALLS INTO 2027

PC and phone buyers are already flinching. Notebook stocks now carry the higher chip cost, which is weighing on sales, yet PC brands are still buying because they expect DRAM to stay tight in 2027 as more output shifts to servers. Mobile DRAM stays tight for the same reason, even as high costs cut phone production. Graphics DRAM is being pulled toward AI chips, with some PC brands looking back at GDDR6 to cut bills. Combined server DRAM and HBM bit supply is seen up 27 percent in 2027 once new fabs and node moves kick in during the second half, which is growth, not a flood. HBM’s share of industry DRAM wafer capacity is seen moving from about 20 percent toward 30 percent, and a wafer cut into HBM yields far fewer bits than the same wafer sold as DDR5.

Douglas Kim of Douglas Research Advisory put Samsung’s third-quarter HBM bit shipments up close to 50 percent from the second quarter. Yonhap notes Samsung was first to mass-produce HBM4, with a larger earnings contribution seen next year. Mirae Asset analyst Young-gun Kim, who on Oct. 6 kept Buy ratings on both Korean chipmakers, is not treating 2027 as the peak.

We expect memory supply/demand conditions to be tighter in 2028 than in 2027.

Young-gun Kim, analyst, Mirae Asset

Much of next year’s output is already spoken for under long-term deals, and the new factories in the plans mostly come on late in 2028. That is the supply calendar sitting under the 20.0 percent sequential profit rise, and it is why a slower step-up from a 107.4 trillion won base is not, on its own, a demand break. TrendForce still has conventional DRAM prices to rise 10 to 15% in the current quarter.

Why Memory Stocks Sold a Record Print

Memory stocks sold off together because they now trade as one AI-memory basket, and the first public number of the season landed as a sales miss against the high bar. Profit growth is also slowing in percentage terms because the base is huge: 20.0 percent on 89.49 trillion won is a larger won add than a triple-digit jump off a small year-ago quarter, and it is harder to cheer after four straight records. Analyst Nic Puckrin put that bar problem in one line after the print.

Samsung is still clearly delivering extraordinary growth, but big numbers no longer impress investors.

Nic Puckrin, analyst, emailed comments

The Seoul tape did not isolate Samsung. The Kospi fell 2.62 percent to 6,625.93, and Samsung shares closed down 1.86 percent at 263,500 won, roughly in line with the index. Foreign selling, a US 10-year yield move, and higher oil all hit Korean tech the same session. It was also the second linked drop in four sessions. On Oct. 6, after a Toshiba expansion plan revived glut talk, Micron fell 1.7 percent, SanDisk 2.6 percent, and SK Hynix 6.4 percent. The shortage story and the glut scare are now running in the same week, which is what a late-cycle memory tape looks like even while contract prices are still rising.

The sales miss is the phone-and-TV hole, not a break in HBM or server DRAM. Conventional DRAM bits were seen about flat quarter on quarter because inventories are already thin, while HBM bits jumped. Pricing did the heavy lifting on the 55.1 percent margin. That is a richer mix, and it is also the mix that taxes Galaxy bills and cloud capex. Investors who bought the memory trade for a straight line of upside now have to underwrite a boom that bills the same companies’ other products, and the customers who were supposed to keep spending without flinching.

Micron, SanDisk and SK Hynix Took the Hit Together

US-listed memory and storage names closed Oct. 8 in a tight band, a few points worse than Samsung’s home listing. The Roundhill Memory ETF, launched on April 2 and heavy in Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, dropped 5.13 percent to $56.93. SanDisk, one of the S&P 500’s large 2026 winners with a 578.01 percent year-to-date gain, fell 4.90 percent to $1,609.46. Micron, up 263.14 percent year to date, closed at $1,035.84, down 4.79 percent. SK Hynix’s US line fell 4.35 percent to $170.50. Seagate fell 4.05 percent to $774.83, with an 182.27 percent year-to-date gain still on the board.

THURSDAY’S MEMORY-STOCK CLOSE

Those closes do not rewrite the 107.4 trillion won, and they do not rewrite TrendForce’s still-rising contract board. They price a bar problem: a world-record quarter that missed the sales number Wall Street had stretched to, while Samsung’s own phones and the cloud builders who buy HBM start to show what the shortage costs. The Oct. 29 earnings conference call is when the company has to put official figures on memory versus Mobile eXperience. Until that split is public, the market is trading a record profit as if the people who pay for it have started to matter as much as the people who print it.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of Samsung’s third-quarter guidance and related memory-chip prices and share moves, and it is for information only. It is not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, ETF, or other security, and it is not a forecast of future returns. Readers should consult a licensed financial adviser or other qualified professional who can review their own holdings, time horizon, and risk before acting on anything described here. Figures, ratings, and business-line estimates reflect the company guidance, research notes, and market data cited in this piece as of the dates of those sources and can change when Samsung files final results or when contract prices and share prices move.