Samsung announced today that its revenue reached KRW 133 trillion (around $100 billion) during the first quarter (Q1) of this year, while its operating profit stood at KRW 57.2 trillion (around $43 billion). That marks an eightfold increase compared to its profit in Q1 2025. This strong performance was driven by solid sales of the company’s high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in AI data centers.
The South Korean firm posted its earnings estimates on its website. A detailed financial breakdown will be revealed later this month during its earnings call, where shareholder questions will also be addressed. Samsung is one of only three companies in the world that manufacture advanced HBM chips, and almost 95% (around $57.2 billion) of the company's profits came from its semiconductor chip division.
All major players in the AI ecosystem, including AMD and Nvidia, are looking to use Samsung’s recently launched HBM4 chips in their AI accelerators. In addition to HBM, Samsung is also supplying SOCAMM2 memory chips and SSDs for AI data centers. Memory chip prices have doubled this quarter alone and are expected to rise by another 50 percent during the current quarter (Q2).
Samsung is also seeing an uptick in contract chip manufacturing, or foundry, orders in recent months. For the past couple of years, Samsung Foundry struggled to secure orders as clients favored TSMC. However, with Samsung’s 2nm process node showing promising performance and TSMC facing capacity constraints, more companies, including Tesla, are now considering Samsung for chip production.
Despite these gains, the company continues to face intense competition in the smartphone, TV, and home appliance segments. Kim Sunwoo, a senior analyst at Meritz Securities, said that Samsung's smartphone division could post around KRW 4 trillion (around $2.65 billion) in profit, which is better than what analysts expected, but accounts for less than 5% of Samsung Electronics' entire profit in Q1 2026.
Sohn In-joon, an analyst at Heungkuk Securities, expects Samsung to post record-breaking profit of KRW 75 trillion (around $50 billion) in Q2 2026.
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