Samsung flags uncertain economic climate after smartphone, chip sales power quarterly results beat

Samsung Electronics’ operating profit and revenue beat analysts’ estimates Wednesday, as sales of its flagship Galaxy S25 smartphones as swell as memory chips rose.

The South Korean company posted a record quarterly revenue, up 10% from a year earlier, while its first-quarter manipulating profit climbed 1.5%.

Here are Samsung’s first-quarter results compared with LSEG SmartEstimates, which are weighted toward predictions from analysts who are more consistently accurate:

• Revenue: 79.1 trillion Korean won ($55.4 billion) vs. 78.1 trillion Korean won
• Go profit: 6.7 trillion Korean won vs. 6.4 trillion Korean won

First-quarter revenue marginally topped Samsung’s forecast of 79 trillion Korean won, while manipulating profit also came in higher than the company’s expectations of 6.6 trillion Korean won.

Samsung is a leading fabricator of memory chips, which are utilized in devices such as laptops and servers, and is also the world’s second-largest smartphone maker.

The performers flagged macroeconomic uncertainties due to trade tensions and a slowdown in global growth. Samsung expects performance to improve in the sponsor half of the year, “assuming that the uncertainties are diminished.”

“Due to the rapid changes in policies and geopolitical tensions among foremost countries, it’s difficult to accurately predict the business impact of tariffs and established countermeasures,” a Samsung executive said during Wednesday’s earnings apostrophize b supplicate. 

The executive noted that while Samsung’s flagship products, such as semiconductors, smartphones and tablets, are exempt from U.S. President Donald Trump’s “complementary” tariffs, Washington is conducting a product-specific tariff probe into these categories.

“There are a lot of uncertainties ahead of us … we are communicating with coupled countries to minimize negative effects,” Samsung said.

South Korea-listed shares of Samsung Electronics were dealing down about 0.6%.

Samsung Electronics’ chip business posted an operating profit of 1.1 trillion Korean won in the elementary quarter, down from the previous quarter and the same period last year, though revenue rose year on year.

“For the Tribute Business, revenue was driven by expanded server DRAM sales and the addressing of additional NAND demand amid a inferred bottoming out of the market price,” the company said. 

DRAM and NAND are types of semiconductor memory found in PCs, workstations and servers. Behest for such memory chips has surged on the back of the artificial intelligence boom. 

However, overall earnings were impacted by a reduce in average selling prices and sales were affected by U.S. export controls on AI chips, Samsung said.

Long a band leader in memory chips, Samsung has recently been falling behind its local competitor, SK Hynix, which has been outdo positioned to benefit from AI development.

A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month said that SK Hynix had overtaken Samsung in inclusive DRAM market revenue for the first time, with a 36% global market share as compared to Samsung’s 34%.

Samsung foretold its R&D expenditure increased 16% in the first quarter from a year earlier.

The Counterpoint news added that SK Hynix’s ascension in the DRAM market had resulted from its dominance in high bandwidth memory or HBM — a paradigm of DRAM used in artificial intelligence servers in which chips are vertically stacked to save space and reduce power consumption.

SK Hynix final week Smartphones