Samsung Q3 Profit Clears 100 Trillion Won on AI Memory Boom

Samsung Electronics guided to a preliminary third-quarter operating profit of 107.4 trillion won, or roughly $80.17 billion, the first time a South Korean company has cleared the 100-trillion-won bar in a single quarter and the fourth consecutive record for the chipmaker. The figure, reported by Reuters and covered by Bloomberg, beat the LSEG SmartEstimate of 106.1 trillion won.

Revenue likely rose about 127% year-on-year to 195 trillion won. Operating profit jumped from 12.17 trillion won in the same period last year, a near nine-fold swing.

The driver is familiar. AI buildouts have "outstripped memory chip supply growth," Reuters wrote, "a gap expected to persist into 2027." Conventional DRAM and NAND remain tight, and high-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM soldered onto Nvidia and AMD training accelerators, is the hottest line. Ahead of the print, TrendForce flagged that Samsung's memory margin could top 80%.

SBS News put the number in scale: this is a milestone "no other company in the world, aside from Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil giant Aramco, has ever reached." The run of record quarters has made Samsung a recurring beat for us, with twenty-four tracked items in the last ninety days spanning KEPCO grid-prepayment disputes and South Korea's rewritten espionage law.

Samsung's HBM mix is the forward lever. HBM4 is expected to grow to 80% of HBM revenue next year, up from 40% today, and analysts cited by Reuters see HBM selling prices more than doubling in 2027. The company is scheduled to release the full divisional breakdown later this month; that is where investors will see how much of the 107.4-trillion-won figure came from HBM versus commodity DRAM. The preliminary release names no HBM4 anchor customers and gives no Q4 guidance.