Samsung Profits Slide Down On Year

Since another month has begun, companies are, naturally, letting financial details slip, with Samsung being, in this case, the outfit that got reported on by market watchers.

Recent reports from Digitimes reveal that Samsung had a mostly mixed third quarter, financially-wise.

More specifically, while profits and revenue did show some growth compared to the second quarter, the same cannot be said about the on-year basis.

Even though 2011 was supposed to be an improvement over what the struggling economy allowed last year, Samsung still fell.

Estimates place profits for the July-September period at the equivalent of $3.6 billion (2.6 billion Euro).

The sum is about 13.6% lower than that of last year's third quarter, albeit higher than during the 2011 April-June period.

It will take the company's official financial update to shed real light on the whole situation, although it is not hard to discern what Samsung isn't going through its best times.

Its entire scuffle with Apple is the most obvious, especially after the latter flat-out refused its settlement offer.

It is unclear just how much the courtroom battle has been affecting Samsung's finances, probably not much (yet), but being denied sales of the Galaxy Tab tablet (and other things) definitely isn't something to its liking.

If things last much longer, it is possible that Samsung won't have any tablets out for the holiday season.

Fortunately, the outfit deals in many more things, like phones, monitors (with or without PCoIP support), multimedia devices and, of course, many DRAM and NAND products.

Samsung even entered a partnership with Micron recently, through which they will create and promote so-called hybrid memory.

No estimates were made for the newly started fourth quarter, but some sort of guidance will no doubt be provided as soon as the IT player gets around to having a new call with financial analysts.