Samsung reports 15-fold increase in operating profit in last quarter

Seoul, South Korea — Samsung Electronics Co. reported a 15-fold increase in operating profit in the second quarter of this year, largely driven by strong demand for memory chips amid a boom in artificial intelligence technologies.

The South Korean semiconductor and smartphone giant said in a statement Wednesday that its operating profit for the April-June quarter came to 10.4 trillion won ($7.5 billion), up from 670 billion won in the same period last year.

Samsung said its consolidated revenue rose about 23 percent to 74 trillion won ($53 billion). The company said favorable market conditions led to higher average selling prices, while robust sales of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels also contributed to the improved results.

“Driven by strong demand for HBM (high bandwidth) memory as well as conventional DRAM and SSD (solid state drives) for servers, the overall memory market continued its recovery,” Samsung said in a statement.

“This increased demand is a result of continued investments in AI by cloud service providers and growing demand for AI from enterprises for their on-premises servers,” he said.

In the second half of this year, Samsung said AI servers are expected to take up a larger share of the market as major cloud service providers and enterprises expand their investments in AI.