Samsung Q3 2026 earnings: a record 107.4 trillion won operating profit beat estimates while sales fell short

Samsung Electronics said on Thursday, October 8, 2026 that it expects third-quarter operating profit of about 107.4 trillion won, up 782.5% from 12.17 trillion won a year earlier and the first quarter in which a Korean company has earned more than 100 trillion won. The preliminary figure beat the LSEG SmartEstimate of 106.1 trillion won, while sales of about 195 trillion won fell short of the FnGuide consensus of 200.3 trillion won. The guidance reached the MoveSurge news feed at 22:44 UTC on October 7, or 07:44 in Seoul. At 10:30 a.m. local time Samsung shares were down 0.2% at 268,000 won, more than 25% below their June record high.

Samsung Q3 2026 preliminary results

Operating profit rose 20% from the second quarter on a 13.7% increase in sales, so the operating margin widened from 52.2% to 55.1%. Beating on profit while missing on sales means Samsung earned more on each won of revenue than analysts had modelled, which points to prices and product mix rather than volume. Over the first nine months of 2026, operating profit totalled 254.13 trillion won on sales of 500.37 trillion won. SBS compared the quarter with the roughly 116 trillion won Saudi Aramco earned in the second quarter of 2022.

Where the profit came from

The preliminary release carries no breakdown by division; Samsung publishes full results on October 29. Analysts quoted by Reuters attributed the jump to memory. Douglas Kim of Douglas Research Advisory estimated that Samsung's shipments of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the stacked DRAM used in AI accelerators, rose close to 50% from the second quarter. Unnamed analysts estimated that the mobile business lost more than $1 billion, and the foundry business was expected to remain loss-making. If those estimates hold, the memory business earned well above the 55.1% group margin. Before the release, SK Securities analyst Han Dong-hee had estimated the memory margin at about 76%.

TrendForce expects contract prices for conventional DRAM to rise a further 10% to 15% in the fourth quarter, and analysts surveyed by Reuters expect fourth-quarter operating profit to come in about 8.2% above the third quarter.

The HBM4E qualification report

On October 7 the Korea Economic Daily reported that Samsung's 12-layer HBM4E, its next generation of high-bandwidth memory, had passed quality verification by Nvidia and several large cloud companies at the end of September. The report put the part at 48 GB per stack and 14 Gbps per pin, with up to 16 Gbps, for 3.6 TB/s of bandwidth. Samsung told the newspaper it could not confirm the qualification, and no supply volume, contract or mass-production date has been disclosed. In its second-quarter results on July 30, Samsung said it had scaled up HBM4 sales and shipped the industry's first HBM4E samples.

How Samsung and SK Hynix shares traded

Samsung closed at 268,500 won on October 7, down 1.29%. On Thursday the KOSPI opened 0.07% higher, was down 0.64% at 09:12 and stood at 6,793.26 at 10:30, down 0.2%. At that point Samsung was down 0.2% and SK Hynix was up 1.7% at 1,752,000 won. Earlier coverage: Samsung's 2027 HBM4 pricing and the HBM race between Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron and CXMT.