By Adam Clark
Samsung Electronics expects to report a huge profit surge in the first quarter. It's good news for its peer Micron Technology, with both companies set to ride a wave of demand for memory chips.
Samsung said Tuesday that its operating profit likely reached 57.200 trillion won ($37.91 billion) in the March quarter, a more than eightfold increase from the same period a year earlier. The South Korean company is benefiting from a 68% rise in revenue as well as much stronger margins.
While Samsung didn't provide a breakdown of its results, the profit leap is almost certainly driven by its memory-chip business, with prices spiking on the need for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to support artificial-intelligence hardware.
Micron is the chief rival of South Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix in making HBM chips, which are crucial for the latest AI chips. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are all jockeying for position to supply the latest HBM4 chips to Nvidia and other AI chip makers.
Samsung's stellar results bode well for Micron, even as the two companies compete fiercely. Demand for memory is expected to outstrip supply until at least the middle of next year when substantial new manufacturing capacity will come online.
"Samsung leads the pack in HBM4 qualification, while SK Hynix and Micron are working through some minor issues but expected to be qualified for [Nvidia's next-generation hardware] Rubin," wrote KeyBanc analyst John Vinh in a research note this week. "Ultimately, it's expected that all three memory producers will be qualified as there is not enough HBM4 capacity to support Rubin if all 3 are not."
Samsung in February said it became the world's first to mass produce HBM4 chips. Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra previously told analysts the company was set to ramp up its own HBM4 production in the second quarter of 2026.
Micron shares were down 0.7% in premarket trading. The stock has risen more than fivefold in the past 12 months.
Other chip stocks were benefiting from Samsung's results. STMicroelectronics, which collaborates with Samsung on various semiconductor technologies, was rising 6% in European trading.
Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 07, 2026 07:39 ET (11:39 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments