From Reuters, July 5/6:
Samsung likely to post 18-fold jump in profit on surging AI demand for memory
- Q2 profit seen hitting third straight record high
- Memory shortage expected to persist into next year
- Workers' bonuses could come in higher than expected, analysts say
- Potential AI infrastructure delays pose biggest risk, analysts say
- Rising memory prices squeeze mobile business margin
Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), is likely to estimate that its operating profit jumped about 18-fold to another record high from a year earlier in the second quarter, as AI growth continues to strain memory supply and push chip prices higher.
On Tuesday, the world's largest memory chipmaker by sales is likely to flag an operating profit of 86 trillion won ($56.35 billion) for the April to June quarter, according to an LSEG SmartEstimate based on forecasts from 30 analysts, weighted toward those with the best track records.
Up from 4.7 trillion won a year earlier, this would mark a third consecutive quarter of record operating profit for Samsung, reflecting a prolonged memory shortage, as booming demand for AI inference infrastructure continues to outpace supply growth from global memory manufacturers.Analysts expect the memory market to remain undersupplied at least through next year.The robust growth has been driven not only by high-bandwidth memory (HBM), but also by stronger demand for conventional DRAM and NAND products as AI applications, particularly agentic AI, expand into a broader range of computing workloads.Unlike earlier AI applications focused mainly on training large models, agentic AI systems perform more complex, multi-step tasks that require additional memory for server processors and greater storage capacity to retain and retrieve data during inference, analysts said....
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