Samsung Operating Profit Jumps 64%, Annual Sales Hit Record Highs

Samsung Electronics announced that its operating profit for the last quarter jumped 64% pushing the tech giant’s annual sales and operating revenue to the highest levels in the company’s history. The South Korean company thanked its booming semiconductor business for the gains.

On Tuesday, Samsung offered a preview of its earnings report for October-December. The operating profit now stands at $14.1 billion, a significant increase from the previous year’s levels. However, the operating profit has missed analysts’ expectations due to the appreciation of the won against the U.S. dollar and a series of bonuses to its workers in December.

The company gave employees $655 million in bonuses over the last 12 months. The sales for the last three months jumped 24% to $61.8 billion, which marks the highest level in the company’s history.

The operating income in the last year hit $50.2 billion, which marks an 83% increase from 2016 levels. Also, annual sales saw a big rise (19%) to $224.2 billion. The company has not released the figures for the quarterly net profit. It promised to offer all the details by the end of the month.

Samsung Semiconductor Business Thriving

Analysts agree that business has been so good for Samsung due to its semiconductor unit. Its memory chips have sold like hot cakes due to a skyrocketing demand as the world needs more storage space for media files on devices and servers.

There is also a huge demand for more computing power which pushed the sales of Samsung memory chips to record-high levels. Samsung currently dominates the market as it produces more than half of DRAM memory chips and one-third of NAND memory chips sold worldwide.

DRAM chips boost computing power, while NAND chips are used for enhanced storage. The price of the memory chips saw a big jump last year but that did not shrink overall demand.
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Nancy Young

When I was younger I used to spend almost all of my free time playing computer games. My mom and dad would go mental over this. “You’re never going to do anything with your life if you are going to play games all day” they used to say. What was even more unusual was the fact that I played more games than most of the guys in my friend group. Looking back, I have to admit that I probably played a bit too much, but I also learned a lot of great things. When I turned 20 I decided that it was high-time to make some money of my own, but the only jobs I could get were that of waitress or cashier. How exciting. After several excruciating months of serving tables I had a great idea: since I love gaming so much, why don’t I write about it? That’s when I started doing small writing projects on Elance. Eventually, I got an offer for a part-time job. During that time I learned all about content marketing strategies and how search engines work. I started writing about various topics such as technology, health and lifestyle and discovered that I was actually good at it. On November 24, 2014, I became part of the ArgyllFreePress team.