Dubai, United Arab Emirates – October, 2026: Samsung has reported record third-quarter operating profit, supported by strong demand for memory chips amid the ongoing AI boom. Despite the historic results, investors remained cautious as the company’s chip division fell slightly short of expectations and details of its shareholder return plans were pushed to January.
Commenting on Samsung’s third-quarter results, Josh Gilbert, Lead Analyst for APAC at etoro, said:“Samsung’s third-quarter result was nothing short of astonishing. It’s the biggest quarterly operating profit any tech company has ever reported, and yet the market still wasn’t impressed. Investors have been so spoilt by the AI trade that a record result is now treated as the bare minimum rather than a reason to celebrate.
“The chip division made 106.5 trillion won, around USD 80 billion, although that came in just shy of expectations. The bigger letdown is that one day after SK Hynix showed the market exactly what it wanted to see, shareholders came to Samsung looking for the full return plan and walked away with a date in January instead.
“Samsung’s chip business has become the whole show, delivering almost every won of the group’s operating profit this quarter. A year ago, everything outside of chips added around 5 trillion won to Samsung’s operating profit, and this quarter that has shrunk to less than 1 trillion won, with smartphones sliding into the red.
“For all the talk of Samsung being a diversified giant, anyone holding the stock today is really holding a memory maker with a phone business attached, and that leaves its fortunes riding almost entirely on where memory prices go from here.
“The big question now is how long this cycle can last. SK Hynix gave a confident answer yesterday, saying it expects demand to outstrip supply through 2030. Samsung’s shares jumped 9% on the back of that, which goes a long way to explaining why today’s reaction has been so subdued.
“The longer-term worry is that Samsung is spending heavily on new capacity in an industry with a long history of boom turning to bust, but the company itself says the memory shortage is deepening rather than easing, which tells you the industry still can’t build fast enough to keep up.
“It feels like we’re only scratching the surface of what AI can do, which means demand for memory still has a long way to go.
“The AI build-out is still paying memory makers handsomely, and the cheques from big tech are only getting bigger, with Microsoft this week flagging pricier memory as one of the reasons its spending will speed up in the second half of its financial year.
“Samsung may be flying on one engine, but right now it’s an engine every AI data centre depends on.”
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