Memory chips and the Galaxy S22 family send Samsung's profits through the roof
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Although it's still a little early for tech companies to know exactly how well they did from a financial standpoint during the recently concluded first quarter of the year, Samsung is obviously not looking to break with tradition, releasing an official estimate for the January - March 2022 period before putting together all the detailed data a few weeks down the line.
Despite well-documented global supply chain woes that led among others to a later-than-originally-expected Galaxy S22 series release, the world's largest memory chipmaker and smartphone vendor believes its consolidated operating profit for Q1 2022 will come out to anywhere between 14 and 14.2 trillion Korean won.
Considering the median figure of this estimated range, Samsung is probably looking at a net gain of around $11.6 billion for the first three months of this year, which would represent a small sequential improvement from the chaebol's Q4 2021 profit score and an outstanding 50 percent or so jump from Q1 2021.
Perhaps even more impressively, 14.1 trillion won would be Samsung's highest Q1 profit in four years, and while the company has yet to break down that expected result by divisions, analysts unsurprisingly think memory chips and smartphones will prove to be the quarter's top performers.
Back during the first quarter of last year, for instance, the semiconductor and mobile communications businesses were responsible for roughly 35 and 46 percent respectively of the tech giant's comparatively low 9.38 trillion won operating profit, a proportion that's likely to remain largely the same when the full Q1 2022 financial report comes out.
In terms of consolidated sales, Samsung is also looking at a solid progress from 65.39 trillion won back in Q1 2021 to 77 trillion now, although Counterpoint Research (via CNBC) is actually anticipating a worrying 11 percent year-on-year decline in global smartphone shipments.
The company clearly has a problem in the low and mid-end segments of the handset market because the high-end Galaxy S22 lineup is performing well at the worldwide box-office despite recent throttling controversies.
In line with initial expectations, Samsung was reportedly able to move "slightly over" 6 million S22, S22+, and S22 Ultra units by the end of March, beating the numbers posted by the Galaxy S21 family during its first week of availability last year by a whopping 50 percent or so.
We'll apparently have to wait until April 28 to find out more about the year-opening performance of each of Samsung's separate departments, but for the time being, congratulations are probably in order for the execs' abilities to weather all the recent chip shortage and smartphone bug-related storms.
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