Samsung Electronics has issued earnings guidance for the third quarter of 2026, putting consolidated sales at about 195 trillion won and consolidated operating profit at about 107.40 trillion won. For comparison, the company reported 89.49 trillion won of operating profit in the second quarter of 2026 and 12.17 trillion won in the third quarter of 2025.
The scale of that year-on-year change is the story, and the clearest single number yet on what AI memory demand is doing to the supplier side. Samsung is one of three large makers of the high-bandwidth memory that sits beside AI accelerators, and demand for it has been the dominant variable in memory pricing through 2026.
What the guidance does not do is say so. It is a short regulatory disclosure with two figures and no divisional breakdown, so it attributes nothing to memory, to foundry or to the handset business. Samsung notes that Korean disclosure rules do not allow estimates to be given as ranges, so the published figures are the midpoints of internal ranges, 194 to 196 trillion won of sales and 107.3 to 107.5 trillion won of operating profit.
The numbers are also unaudited guidance rather than results. The division-level detail, and any statement from the company about how much of this is AI, waits for the full quarterly filing.
Source: Samsung Electronics, 8 October 2026.