While most tech companies would probably kill to be in Samsung‘s position, the ex-number one smartphone vendor in the world was certainly not pleased with its financial performance in 2023, finishing the year not only behind Apple in global handset sales but also with a worryingly low overall profit score.
But things are starting to look up again for the Korea-based giant, and that’s likely due to both slowly recovering Galaxy phone shipments and rapidly rising memory chip prices. We won’t know for sure which of the company’s divisions generated the biggest financial gains in Q1 2024 until late April, with only a (very encouraging) overall preliminary result made public today.
In short, Samsung expects to make approximately 6.6 trillion Korean won in profit for the January-March timeframe of this year on the back of consolidated sales of around 71 trillion won. That equates to roughly $4.9 billion and $52.5 billion respectively, and what’s interesting to note is that profits are up massively from the KRW 0.64 trillion reported back in Q1 2023 while the revenue figure has only jumped from 63.75 trillion won this time last year.
Samsung has clearly found a way (or several) to squeeze a lot more money from roughly the same number of products sold around the world, although the record-setting profit scores of a few years back still look out of reach for the foreseeable future.
In Q3 2021, for instance, the company generated an operating profit of nearly 16 trillion won on sales of around 74 trillion, but there’s likely no benefit in dwelling on the past. Not when Samsung is looking at a year-on-year increase of 931 percent (!!!) in Q1 profit, as well as its best such result since Q3 2022.
Looking ahead to the future, it’s hard to know exactly what to expect… until Samsung publishes its full and detailed financial analysis for the latest quarter, although global memory chip demand is predicted to stay steady and Galaxy S24 series sales are still booming worldwide. In short, there are quite a few reasons for the company to expect further growth despite a number of other things that look less promising, like foldable handset shipments.
