by Joyce Lee and Heekyong Yang
SEOUL (Reuters) – Samsung Electronics on Friday reported a 52% jump in fourth-quarter profits on Friday on strong demand for computer server processors and improving margins at its manufacturing outsourcing business. semiconductors.
The South Korean group, the world’s number one memory and mobile phone, estimates its operating profit for the period October-December at 13.8 trillion won (10.1 billion euros), the highest for a fourth quarter since 2017.
However, this result is lower than the Refinitiv SmartEstimate consensus which put it at 15.2 trillion won, which analysts explain among other things by bonuses distributed to employees, marketing expenses for smartphone activities and the costs of launching new flat screens.
“It feels like a big surprise because it’s below the consensus but I don’t think it’s as bad as it sounds. It seems to reflect various costs passed over the fourth quarter,” comments Park Sung-soon, analyst at Cape Investment & Securities.
“It is not yet known whether there are any deviations from the expected chip volumes,” he adds.
The estimated turnover for the quarter was up 23% year on year to 76 trillion won, said the group, an amount in line with market expectations.
Samsung is due to release its detailed quarterly on January 27.
While memory prices fell over October-December, the growth in demand on the server market benefited both sales of DRAM chips, which are widely used in data centers, and NAND memories, which are used for storage. data in electronic devices, analysts say.
Samsung shares ended the day up 1.82% on the Seoul Stock Exchange. It has posted an increase of around 11% since early November, with the market expecting a less pronounced drop than initially expected in memory prices in the first half of this year before rebounding.
Deliveries of smartphones from the group’s mobile activity reached around 67 million units over the last three months of 2021, against 69.3 million in the third quarter, estimates the research firm Counterpoint Research.
This activity was recently integrated into a new division called “Device Experience” (DX) with televisions and other consumer electronics products.
(Report Joyce Lee and Heekyong Yang, with Choonsik Yoo; French version Marc Angrand, edited by Blandine Hénault)
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