Samsung is still making a lot of money despite barely improving its sales numbers

That's according to the chaebol itself, which officially expects to yield a profit of approximately 9 trillion Korean won for the October - December 2020 period on consolidated sales of around KRW 61 trillion. Those numbers roughly equate to 8.25 billion US dollars and $55.9 billion respectively, marking a pretty significant drop from Samsung's Q3 2020 scores but also surging from the same period of the previous year.

Interestingly, while the company's overall sales may have registered a modest year-on-year growth of no more than a couple of percentage points, the quarterly operating profit likely jumped by around 25 percent compared to the final three months of 2019. 

That means Samsung is making considerably more money on every product sold, which most likely includes smartphones. Then again, it's no big secret that memory chips and display panels are the tech giant's main growth drivers nowadays, with the handset division expected to post a new set of middling results when the full and detailed quarterly report comes out later this month.

Until then, it's worth pointing out that many analysts had expected Samsung to anticipate a slightly higher Q4 2020 profit score, but at the same time, the company's share price in Seoul earned a solid boost on Friday as a direct result of this earnings guidance.

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All in all, Samsung shouldn't be too upset about the way it ended 2020, even though there's definitely plenty of room for improvement in 2021, especially in the smartphone market. To its credit, the company reacted quickly and wisely to the underwhelming sales results of the Galaxy Note 20 duo and the apparent success of Apple's iPhone 12 family, scheduling an unusually early S21 release widely predicted to put the chaebol's mobile division back on the right track.