Samsung could make a lot of money this quarter thanks in part to booming smartphone sales
The coronavirus pandemic hit the mobile industry as a whole pretty hard during the first six months of 2020, but certain smartphone manufacturers had a worse time than others. Samsung, for instance, was severely impacted by a large global decline in demand for ultra-high-end and high-priced handsets, losing its long-held shipment crown in Q2, at least according to one of two market research firms.
Incredibly enough, the Korea-based tech giant managed to offset the shrinking sales and gains of its mobile division with an impressive performance by its hugely lucrative memory business to yield an overall profit score between April and June that was significantly higher than the same number reported both in Q1 2020 and Q2 2019.
Believe it or not, that's still nothing compared to how much the company is expected to earn in the July - September timeframe on the back of recovering smartphone, TV, and home appliance sales. While the quarter is obviously far from over, analysts are already prepared to predict an operating profit tally of more than 10 trillion won.
That would roughly equate to $8.4 billion, well exceeding the KRW 8.15 and 7.78 trillion generated in Q2 2020 and Q3 2019 respectively. Even more remarkably, this would be Samsung's first 10+ trillion won quarterly profit result in two years, which is no small feat to achieve during a global pandemic.
While certain financial pundits are setting their forecasts considerably lower, even a 9.1 trillion won operating profit would mark a solid progress from both the previous quarter and the same three-month period of last year. Naturally, memory chips are expected to play a key role in this healthy growth yet again, but this time around, smartphones should perform well too from both a volume and profit perspective.
Namely, Samsung's always popular Galaxy of Android handsets is tipped to boost its sales numbers by "up to" 49 percent from the year's second quarter, presumably thanks primarily to the new high-end Note 20 duo and mid-rangers like the Galaxy A51 5G and 4G LTE-only A21.
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