Samsung Electronics' Q4 Operating Profit of 6.5 Trillion...Jensen Hwang "Confident of Samsung's HBM Success"

[Anchor]
Samsung Electronics posted a performance in the fourth quarter of last year that was far below the stock market forecast.

While slowing demand and intensifying competition in the same industry were cited as the cause, stock prices soared despite poor performance.

Nvidia's Jensen Huang told a conference at CES in the U.S. that Samsung's HBM test is underway and that he is confident it will succeed.

Reporter Hwang Hye-kyung reports.

[Reporter]
Samsung Electronics' performance fell sharply again.

The provisional performance in the fourth quarter of last year was 75 trillion won in sales and 6.5 trillion won in operating profit.

Jeon Young-hyun, vice chairman of the semiconductor division, even issued an apology, calling it an "earning shock" even after achieving KRW 9.9 trillion in operating profit in the third quarter, but the fourth quarter's performance fell even further.

The market continued to lower its forecast to around 7 trillion won due to the slowing mobile industry and oversupply of memory, but it fell short of this.

Samsung Electronics releases unusual explanatory data

Expanding high-capacity product sales led memory to record sales, but increased R&D costs and upfront costs to expand production capacity, resulting in lower operating profit.

It also cited sluggish mobile demand, intensifying competition among peers, and increasing marketing costs as the background.

But apart from the underperformance, the stock soared.

Analysts say that it is expected to have a positive effect on profits this year because it shook off a lot of one-time costs in the fourth quarter.

[Park Seok-hyun / Woori Bank analyst: Despite the somewhat bad performance, some concerns about the risk of further decline are a little small. Rather, it should be seen that these are working as factors that lead to a slight rebound after the earnings announcement.

Meanwhile, AI semiconductor leader Nvidia drew attention by saying that Samsung's high-bandwidth memory HBM needs to be "designed anew."

During a press conference at CES, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Samsung's HBM is still being tested, but stressed several times that Samsung is working quickly and devotedly that he is confident of success.

I'm YTN Hwang Hye-kyung.