Samsung Electronics' Q4 Operating Profit of 6.5 Trillion...Jensen Hwang "Confident of Samsung's HBM Success"

Samsung Electronics' provisional operating profit for the fourth quarter of last year was 6.5 trillion won Stock market forecast of less than KRW 7 trillion...Announcement of clarification
Foreign buying sent shares soaring 3%
Nvidia Jensen Huang "Samsung HBM Needs to Design New"

[Anchor]
Samsung Electronics posted a performance in the fourth quarter of last year that was far below the stock market forecast.

While slowing demand and intensifying competition in the same industry were cited as the cause, stock prices soared despite poor performance.

Nvidia's Jensen Huang told a conference at CES in the U.S. that Samsung's HBM test is underway and that he is confident it will succeed.

Reporter Hwang Hye-kyung reports.

[Reporter]
Samsung Electronics' performance fell sharply again.

The provisional performance in the fourth quarter of last year was 75 trillion won in sales and 6.5 trillion won in operating profit.

Jeon Young-hyun, vice chairman of the semiconductor division, even issued an apology, calling it an "earnings shock" even after achieving an operating profit of KRW 9 trillion in the third quarter.

Q4 earnings are even lower than that.

The market continued to lower its forecast to around 7 trillion won due to the slowing mobile industry and oversupply of memory, but it fell short of this.

Samsung Electronics' unusually released explanatory data and expanded sales of high-capacity products led memory to record sales, but

It said operating profit decreased as a result of increased R&D costs and increased initial costs to expand production capacity.

It also cited sluggish mobile demand, intensifying competition among peers, and increasing marketing costs as the background.

But apart from the underperformance, the stock soared.

Analysts say that it is expected to have a positive effect on profits this year because it shook off a lot of one-time costs in the fourth quarter.

[Park Seok-hyun / Woori Bank analyst: Despite the somewhat bad performance, some concerns about the risk of further decline are a little small. Rather, it should be seen that these are working as factors that lead to a slight rebound after the earnings announcement.

Meanwhile, AI semiconductor leader Nvidia drew attention by saying that Samsung's high-bandwidth memory HBM needs to be "designed anew."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told a press conference at CES that Samsung's HBM is still being tested

However, he stressed several times that Samsung is working quickly and devotedly, so he can do it, and he is confident of success.

I'm YTN Hwang Hye-kyung.


Video editing: Jung Kook-yoon
Design: Lee Na-eun