Samsung Electronics likely saw a 38% rise in profits for the April-June quarter thanks to strong chip prices and demand from a pandemic-induced consumer appetite for electronics and data center investment, which is now recovering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The operating profit of the world’s largest memory chip and smartphone manufacturer is expected to have risen to 11.3 trillion won ($10 billion).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Samsung’s strong performance, which is surprising because it shipped fewer smartphones than in the January-March period, illustrates the very high demand for chips that has depleted inventories and filled production capacity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The result would be a 20% increase over the first quarter and marks Samsung’s highest operating profit for the second quarter since 2018, with revenue expected to have risen 15.4%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prices of DRAM chips, which are ubiquitous in servers, mobile phones and other computing devices, jumped 27% compared to the March quarter, while prices of NAND flash chips, which serve the data storage market, rose 8.6%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They estimated that the chip division’s operating profit in April-June rose about 22% from the same period last year to about 6.6 trillion won.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, Samsung’s smartphone sales fell from about 76 million in the first quarter to about 59 million in April-June as sales slowed for its newest flagship model, which hit the market earlier this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lower demand from India, ravaged by the pandemic during the quarter, as well as a tight supply of some mobile processor chips, may also have had an impact on shipments, said analysts, who estimated the mobile business’s operating profit at about 2.9 trillion won.<\/p>\n\n\n