Profit spike: A Samsung consumer with a Galaxy Z TriFold smartphone in Hong Kong. Some brokerage estimates indicate a formidable quarter for the South Korean electronics giant, which is due to release preliminary earnings this week. — Bloomberg
SEOUL: Samsung Electronics is expected to deliver a sharply stronger fourth quarter as legacy memory prices rebounded late in 2025, extending a recovery from the dip in profits it endured during the 2023 memory downturn.
Samsung is scheduled to release preliminary earnings for the October to December period of 2025 this week.
The baseline market consensus compiled by FnGuide, a local financial data provider that aggregates brokerage earnings forecasts, estimated fourth quarter revenue at 88.62 trillion won and operating profit at around 16 trillion won.
That would represent a year-on-year increase of 11.8% in revenue and a 146.5% jump in operating profit. More recent brokerage estimates indicated a stronger quarter than this consensus suggested.
According to data compiled by Yonhap Infomax from reports issued by 10 local securities firms over the past month, Samsung’s average operating profit estimate stood at 18.99 trillion won, with more than 16 trillion won expected to be generated by the Device Solutions semiconductor division.
This would mark a substantial sequential improvement from the third quarter when operating profit stood at 12.20 trillion won.
IBK Securities published the most aggressive outlook, estimating fourth quarter operating profit at 21.75 trillion won.
IBK analyst Kim Woon-ho attributed the upward revision to faster-than-expected memory price increases and the impact of a weaker won, noting that most semiconductor transactions are settled in US dollars, which amplifies reported earnings when converted into local currency.
Historically, Samsung’s highest quarterly operating profit remains 17.57 trillion won, recorded in the third quarter of 2018 during the last global memory supercycle.
The rebound in earnings coincided with a late-2025 spike in memory prices, particularly in legacy DRAM and NAND.
According to DRAMeXchange, the average fixed contract price for PC DRAM DDR4 8Gb rose from US$1.35 at the end of 2024 to US$9.30 at the end of 2025, a nearly seven-fold increase.
Prices climbed 32.9% in the fourth quarter alone, reaching the highest level since tracking began in 2016.
DDR4, first introduced in 2014, is an older memory standard.
The price surge was driven primarily by supply constraints rather than a broad-based expansion in end demand, as major memory makers reduced or converted legacy production lines to focus on high-bandwidth memory used in servers and artificial intelligence accelerators.
NAND flash prices followed a similar path, with DRAMeXchange data showing that prices for general-purpose 128Gb NAND products used in memory cards and USB devices rose 2.76 times over the year. — The Korea Herald/ANN
