SEOUL — When Samsung Electronics publishes preliminary second-quarter results on Tuesday, the numbers are expected to look like nothing the company has reported before. Analysts polled by the London Stock Exchange Group see revenue of about 170 trillion won, roughly $111 billion, and operating profit near 86 trillion won, about $56 billion. A minority of brokers go further, forecasting operating profit above 90 trillion won.
The figures would put the quarter comfortably ahead of the 57 trillion won Samsung earned in the first three months of the year and roughly 17 times the 4.7 trillion won it earned in the same quarter a year earlier. It would be Samsung’s third consecutive quarterly record, and it would lift first-half operating profit above 140 trillion won — more than the company has ever earned in a full year.
The engine is memory. Samsung, the world’s largest maker of DRAM and NAND flash, has been the biggest beneficiary of a price surge that began in late 2025 as AI data centers absorbed every available chip. Analysts estimate the company’s DRAM average selling prices rose by roughly half in the second quarter, with NAND up even more. High-bandwidth memory, the stacked chips that sit beside AI accelerators, remains sold out for the year across the industry, according to suppliers and analysts.
The results will also reflect a profit-sharing provision tied to a wage agreement Samsung reached with its workers earlier this year, which analysts say will trim the headline figure. Stripping out that charge, several analysts reckon the underlying operating profit would be closer to the 90 trillion won mark that the most bullish brokers are projecting. Samsung’s memory division has been the source of nearly all of the increase, with the foundry and mobile businesses contributing a shrinking share.
The question in Seoul is no longer whether Samsung beats its records, but whether the market has already priced them in. The stock has more than doubled over the past year, and money managers warn that a beat has become the consensus expectation. Morgan Stanley warned this week that the pullback in chipmaker shares was not yet over, citing expectations that large cloud operators would soon impose tighter controls on capital spending. A similar dynamic played out last quarter, when Samsung’s record results were followed by a slide in its shares.
Samsung’s operating margin, a low single digit during the 2023 downturn, is now projected at roughly 50% for the quarter, a level that would rank among the highest ever recorded by a company of its size. Much of that profit comes from selling memory at prices set in a market where three suppliers control virtually all of the supply and demand outstrips it. That pricing power has made Samsung the world’s most profitable technology company over the past two quarters, ahead of even Nvidia.
The comparison with rivals is instructive. SK Hynix, the HBM leader, has been selling out its capacity and is raising about $29 billion in an American depositary receipt listing on Nasdaq scheduled for July 10 — an offering that would be the largest ever by a foreign company on a U.S. exchange. Micron has been posting records of its own. All three are investing tens of billions in new capacity scheduled to arrive in 2027 and 2028, which is exactly what worries the skeptics: the last time all three expanded simultaneously, prices collapsed and profits followed.
Samsung’s final, detailed report, including segment-level figures, is due later this month. The preliminary guidance on Tuesday will be followed by a conference call in which executives are expected to face questions about the durability of AI-driven demand and the scale of next year’s capital spending. Executives have said investment will stay at elevated levels this year, and analysts expect the figure to rise again when the company updates its plans.
One question investors will press on Tuesday is how much of the boom Samsung can keep. The company has been late to the high-bandwidth memory market, trailing SK Hynix in qualifying its HBM stacks with Nvidia, and it has been spending heavily to close the gap. Its next-generation HBM products are expected to win certification this year, which analysts say would let Samsung sell more of the industry’s most profitable memory at a time when supply is sold out. The flip side is that Samsung’s success in HBM would arrive just as all three memory makers expand capacity at once, setting up the supply wave that the industry’s veterans fear.
Samsung’s stock reaction may matter as much as the numbers themselves. The shares have run ahead of the fundamentals, by some measures trading at their richest valuation in years, and the pattern of the past two quarters has been consistent: record results, then profit-taking. How the guidance is received on Tuesday will say more about the market’s faith in the AI cycle than about Samsung’s execution.
For now, the numbers tell a simple story: the AI boom has made Samsung more profitable than it has ever been, and the company is using that profit to build even more capacity. Whether that is a virtuous cycle or the setup for the industry’s next downturn is the question investors will be weighing when the guidance lands on Tuesday.
