Samsung’s DS division president, Kim Yong-kwan, has declared that the South Korean tech giant will earn more profit this year than it did over its first 40 years in semiconductors.
Samsung is about to announce preliminary financial results for the second quarter of 2026, so analysts are listening carefully to any executive noise from the chaebol.
At a town hall meeting on 3 July 2026, Kim reportedly said the Device Solutions division would meet market expectations for operating profit this year.
Analysts currently expect Samsung to report annual operating profit of about 300 trillion won (€171 billion), or roughly $200 billion.
Kim crowed that Samsung’s 2026 profit would beat the cumulative profit it earned during the 40 or so years since it entered the semiconductor business.
Samsung is now negotiating with commodity DRAM customers with the clear aim of lifting prices by up to 20 per cent quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter.
This follows a 90 per cent rise in commodity DRAM prices in the first quarter of 2026, compared with the fourth-quarter 2025 reference prices. Samsung then pushed through another sequential price hike of between 50 and 60 per cent in the second quarter.
LPDDR5X 12GB contract prices have tripled since the first quarter of 2025.
They hovered around $120 towards the end of the first quarter and into the second quarter of 2026.
Since the start of the year, those prices have risen by $68.80, reaching $145 per unit. Samsung is expected to report an operating profit of 84.5994 trillion won (€48.3 billion), or $55.1 billion, for the second quarter of 2026.
Should Samsung hit those expectations, it would pass Nvidia’s first-quarter operating profit of $53.54 billion.
That would officially make Samsung the world’s most profitable enterprise.
Bank of America said: “Concerns that the South Korean government’s planned ₩800tn memory fab cluster signals a peak in the memory cycle are premature. Meaningful production volumes from this cluster are not expected until 2033, and enterprise chip demand (HBM, eSSD, etc.) remains…”
The planned ₩800 trillion (€456 billion) memory fab cluster from Samsung and SK hynix will not deliver meaningful volumes for years.
That means elevated memory prices are likely to persist while AI’s thirst for DRAM and NAND remains strong. Samsung and SK hynix are pouring cash into new capacity, but the useful supply will arrive long after today’s buyers have been mugged at the component counter.
