14 DAY TRIAL // The South Korean manufacturer Samsung Electronics announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of last year. The company posted a net loss of $15 million (22 billion won) for the last three months of last year, as its sales went down 4 percent, stated Robert Yi, head of Samsung's investor relations department in a conference call.
The maker registered a net profit lowered by 26 percent for the entire year, down to 5.5 trillion won, although its revenue grew 15 percent to 73 trillion won. “Our company could not escape the rapid decline in the global economy,” said Robert Yi.
Samsung's cell-phone business has been in a better position during the quarter, as it managed to sell around 2 percent more units although the entire mobile phone market dropped by 5 percent. Samsung's problem is that, although it managed to ship more handsets, it sold them at lower prices, so the average selling price was 10 percent down, stated Yi.
The company announced that it expects the global handset market to shrink even more. The decline should be placed in between 5 to 10 percent this year. Even so, the mobile phone maker hopes it will manage to sell around 200 million handsets throughout the year, which would be about the same volume as in 2008.
The company's memory chip and flat-panel display products registered the worse results during Q4 2008. Revenue in the semiconductor area dropped 18 percent sequentially, while LCD sales went down by 12 percent. Both businesses lost money during the quarter.
The company did not make sales and profit forecasts for the year, stating that the current state of the global economy makes it too difficult to predict any targets. Yet the maker expects dark times to come around. DRAM and flash memory chips are expected to see even lower demand in 2009, and the same will happen with LCD panel demand, as less laptops, monitors and televisions would be sold during the year. At the same time, Samsung also said that the average selling prices in many business units should drop faster than shipments.