Demand for AI components boosts Samsung's results

The South Korean giant Samsung Electronics announced on Tuesday April 30 that it had almost tenfold increased its operating profit year-on-year in the first quarter of 2024 thanks to robust demand for memories and other high value-added products linked to generative artificial intelligence. . From January to March, Samsung's operating profit reached 6.61 trillion won (4.5 billion euros), compared to 640 billion a year earlier, according to a press release.

Net profit (group share) increased almost fivefold to 6,620 billion won, for turnover up 12.8% year-on-year to 71,920 billion won (48.8 billion euros). . The results beat analysts' forecasts, who on average expected a net profit of 4.99 trillion won, according to a survey by financial data firm Yonhap Infomax.

The semiconductor sector, including Samsung and one of the world's largest producers, returned to profit and grew "by meeting demand in the areas of servers, storage, PCs and mobile phones", depending on the group. This success is partly due to “the concentration on high value-added products” such as HBM (high bandwidth memories), DDR5 (dynamic random access memories), SSDs (solid state disks) for servers or again UFS 4.0, a powerful and ultra-fast storage tool for smartphones.

“Looking ahead to the second quarter, the industry is expected to remain strong, driven primarily by demand for generative AI,” the group predicted. Strong sales of premium S24 smartphones, an increase in semiconductor prices also had a positive impact on the results. And the depreciation of the won, which has lost 7% against the dollar since the start of the year, had a positive impact of 300 billion won (200 million euros) on operating income.