Worries about the next earnings report has Samsung investors dumping shares

With Samsung's Q4 earnings expected to take a hit from lower margins in its display business, currency transactions and other factors, stockholders of the Korean OEM starting dumping shares of the company in the first trading day of 2014. Shares of Samsung are down 2% in global markets on Thursday morning. Lee Seung-woo, tech analyst at IBK Investment & Securities, said that the company is having difficulties keeping its profit margins high with its OLED display business.

Samsung is expected to release its fourth quarter earnings next Tuesday and Seung-woo expects the company to report profits of 9.5 trillion Korean won ($9.02 billion USD). That is below consensus estimates calling for profits of 10.2 trillion Korean Won ($9.7 billion USD). Besides problems with OLED displays, part of the shortfall is due to the Won-Dollar exchange rate.


The company is getting ready for CES 2014 in Las Vegas and will be making an announcement about its Exynos line of chips. Some expect the company to introduce two 64-bit chips, one using ARM's 64-bit core while the other will feature Samsung's own 64-bit core and will be 1.43 times faster the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800. Samsung has also announced a new low powered DDR4 RAM chip that could lead to 4GB of RAM on the Samsung Galaxy S5.
source: Reuters