Samsung posts a 15-fold increase in operating profits in last quarter

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

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

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

“Driven by strong demand for HBM (high bandwidth memory) as well as conventional DRAM and server SSDs (solid state drives), the memory market as a whole continued its recovery,” the Samsung release said.

“This increased demand is a result of the continued AI investments by cloud service providers and growing demand for AI from businesses for their on-premise servers,” it said.

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