14 DAY TRIAL // While Apple was recently crowned the most profitable company in the world, Samsung is also growing at a pace that nobody in Cupertino could have imagined a couple of years ago, so today the company announced the highest profit in the history of the firm.
Samsung reported a profit of $9.7 billion (after taxes) the last quarter and $12.7 billion operating profit, up 72.7 percent from the same period the year before. This makes the second quarter profit the highest ever, with revenues increasing 19.8 percent to 61 trillion won ($54.8 billion).
The company expects figures to continue growing in the third quarter, and it has a good reason to think this is possible: the semiconductor division was the one whose revenue skyrocketed the last quarter, as it accounted for $7.2 billion out of the overall operating income.
This means sales of DRAM and NAND chips were responsible for 60 percent of Samsung’s profit, mostly as a result of continued demand and supply constraint.
The mobile division
Without a doubt, what most people are interested in is the mobile division. As compared to the previous quarter, Samsung’s mobile unit actually declined 4.7 percent, bringing home $3.7 billion in operating profit.
It goes without saying that the recently-launched Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ were the two top-selling devices the last quarter, but the Korean firm says the decline was mostly generated because of the increased component prices, which were up 15 percent than for the Galaxy S7.
There are high expectations from the mobile division the next quarter though, especially because Samsung is getting ready to announce the new Note 8 at a New York event on August 23.
So what does Apple have to do with Samsung’s business? The iPhone maker, who is giving the final touches to the first OLED-iPhone in the world, is one of the company’s biggest buyers of organic light-emitting diode panels. Samsung currently holds 90 percent market share in the OLED display market and Apple has reportedly signed deals to purchase panels for both this year’s iPhone 8 and next year’s iPhone generation.
According to reports that surfaced earlier this year, Apple and Samsung signed a two-year deal for the 2017 and 2018 iPhones, with Cupertino to pay approximately $9 billion for OLED displays.