#三星单季利润超英伟达苹果 How did Samsung Electronics surpass NVIDIA to become the world's most profitable company?

A look at the financial report makes it clear: Samsung’s smartphone and home appliance businesses have declined sharply, with profits plummeting by 40%. It’s no wonder Samsung’s home appliances have exited the 🇨🇳 market—this segment is tough to sustain. However, Samsung's semiconductor division contributed 94% of the entire company’s profits, with chip-related businesses collectively booming and operating margins exceeding 70%, higher than both NVIDIA and TSMC. Therefore, Samsung Electronics' surge in profitability is mainly driven by the explosion in memory chip-related businesses.

Previously, NVIDIA made a fortune selling GPU chips. Now, Samsung Electronics is selling memory chips, with orders flooding in and production capacity maxed out. In the gold rush of the AI era, the shovel sellers are making money first. Initially, NVIDIA's inference chips were in short supply. As computing power exploded, everyone realized that AI needed to process more and more information, and memory became insufficient. Thus, Samsung’s memory chips became in high demand.

In fact, Samsung Electronics is the world's largest memory chip manufacturer. As AI develops faster, the demand for memory will only increase, driving memory chip prices higher. Combined with an overwhelming number of orders, profits naturally remain high.

Memory chips mainly include DRAM memory chips and NAND flash memory chips. In the era of AI, facing massive data processing, HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) chips have emerged, offering faster data processing speeds. In these chip sectors, South Korea holds an almost absolute lead. Especially for HBM chips, which are in extremely high demand for AI, Samsung and SK Hynix together account for 80% of the global market—monopoly is not an exaggeration.

Currently, the memory chip orders for Samsung and SK Hynix are already booked through 2027, and production capacity is very limited. Memory chip prices have risen to historical highs, and Samsung plans to increase DRAM memory chip prices by another 20% in the third quarter.

In the future AI era, memory will become increasingly important, and this massive pie is attracting frenzied investment from countries around the world.