South Korea’s Samsung Electronics anticipates that its profits will triple in the last three months of the previous year to a record high, driven by surging memory prices due to booming demand related to artificial intelligence.
According to earnings guidance released on Thursday, the world’s largest memory chipmaker estimated its operating profit at 20 trillion won and consolidated sales of approximately 93 trillion won for the fourth quarter.
This projected profit is a major increase from a year earlier. It also surpasses the longstanding record of 17.6 trillion won that Samsung achieved in three quarters of 2018.
The boom arrives amidst a limited supply of chipmakers such as Nvidia, which are vying for the scarce resources of memory chips to be used in AI applications.
Memory companies are increasing capacity to meet profitable demand. This has created a scarcity in the wider market, impacting chips used in personal computers and mobile devices.
Counterpoint Research said in a report on Wednesday that “The memory market has entered a ‘Hyper-Bull’ phase, with current conditions eclipsing the historic 2018 peak. Supplier leverage is at an all-time high, driven by an insatiable demand for AI and server capacity.”
Therefore, the market watcher estimates that memory prices increased by 40-50 percent in the last quarter of 2025, and will increase by a similar gain in the first quarter of 2026, and by an additional 20 percent in the second quarter.
Although such market forces have driven the manufacturing cost of most consumer electronics manufacturers, it has not been so bad for memory giants such as Samsung and its primary competitors in the same space, SK Hynix and Micron.
However, the Samsung stock has risen more than 145 percent in the last 12 months, and it rose 0.5 percent on Thursday in a choppy trade. The consumer technology giant remains behind SK Hynix in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips in AI processors, such as those of Nvidia.
The increase in production capacity of its HBM is likely to be one of the primary concerns that the company will have in the new year. Samsung intends to release its audited earnings and hold its quarterly earnings call later this month.
