On January 9, Beijing time, Samsung Electronics announced its financial guidance for the fourth quarter of 2023.
According to the guidance, the company's operating profit fell for the sixth consecutive quarter, and last year's full-year profit was nearly 85% year-on-year**, reflecting the continued weakness in global consumer electronics demand, resulting in the company's memory chip demand for a slow recovery.
In the fourth quarter of last year, Samsung's operating profit fell 35% to 28 trillion won (about 15.3 billion yuan), worse than the average analyst expectation of 37 trillion won. The company's revenue for the quarter was 67 trillion won (about 366.4 billion yuan), below the average analyst estimate of 7031 trillion won.
According to previous reports, in the first three quarters of 2023, Samsung Electronics' operating profit was 640 billion won, 670 billion won, and 2., respectively43 trillion won, a total of 374 trillion won.
Based on this calculation, by the end of 2023, Samsung Electronics' full-year operating profit will be about 6.54 trillion won (about 356.)6.8 billion yuan), a year-on-year decrease of 8492%;Full-year revenue was 25816 trillion won (about 1.)4 trillion yuan), a year-on-year decrease of 1458%
With the consumer electronics market in the past two years difficult to recover, memory chips have also experienced several quarters of Samsung's latest financial report guidance also highlights that under the influence of global economic uncertainty, consumer electronics demand has not fully recovered, and the demand for memory chips is still sluggish.
This problem can also be seen from Samsung's previous financial reports. In the first three quarters of last year, Samsung's worst-losing division was its semiconductor division, which accumulated a loss of 12 percent in the first three quarters of last year alone69 trillion won (about 68.8 billion yuan).
Samsung will release a full financial report on January 31, which will include details of last year's revenue by division.
In October last year, Samsung said that the long-term sluggish memory chip market will gradually be driven by the boom in artificial intelligence development in 2024. Samsung executives said at the time that memory chips** should start to come out of the trough around the second half of 2023.
However, this latest earnings guidance suggests that the situation is not as rosy as Samsung had previously anticipated.
Tom Kang, head of research at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, said: "I think this shows that it's slower than we all think....Not as fast and not as strong in some industries. ”
For comparison, in December, Micron Technology, Samsung's main competitor in the semiconductor field, announced a better-than-expected revenue outlook, indicating a recovery in demand for data centers, making up for the lukewarm demand for computers and mobile devices.
Samsung Electronics is currently aiming to catch up with competitor SK hynix in the HBM chip field and gain new growth momentum.
HBM is an advanced chip that processes data faster, and it works with hardware such as Nvidia's accelerator to speed up data processing for intensive tasks such as training AI models.
Under the boom of artificial intelligence, the demand for HBM has skyrocketed recently. Sources recently revealed that Nvidia has paid a large amount of advance payments to SK hynix and Micron to ensure that the HBM3 is safe. SK hynix has already planned to increase its production capacity in this field by 25 times.
Samsung is also counting on the launch of a range of new devices and foldables to drive growth in 2024. The company is gearing up to launch its latest product in the U.S. later this month.