Samsung Electronics shares rose more than 4% in Seoul on Monday to hit an intraday high of 325,000 won, as investors positioned ahead of the company's preliminary second-quarter earnings release scheduled for Tuesday, July 7. Analyst consensus compiled by LSEG points to operating profit of approximately 84.6 to 86 trillion won for the April-to-June period, representing a surge of roughly 18 times compared with the 4.7 trillion won posted in the same quarter a year earlier and would mark the company's third consecutive quarterly profit record.
If the result meets or exceeds the high end of those estimates, Samsung would briefly surpass Nvidia's first-quarter operating profit of $53.54 billion, setting a record for the highest quarterly operating profit ever reported by a technology company globally. Senior executives have already raised the stakes: Kim Yong-kwan, head of Samsung's Device Solutions semiconductor division, stated during an internal town hall meeting last week that the company's full-year 2026 operating profit is expected to meet market consensus of approximately 300 trillion won, an amount analysts say would exceed Samsung's cumulative semiconductor profits from the prior four decades.
The mechanism behind the earnings explosion is straightforward: DRAM average selling prices rose approximately 44% quarter-over-quarter in the second quarter, while NAND prices climbed roughly 53%, according to Kiwoom Securities analysis. Those price increases flowed almost entirely to the bottom line given Samsung's dominant position as the world's largest memory chipmaker by capacity. Server DRAM, enterprise SSDs, and high-bandwidth memory demand from AI data center customers drove the price gains, with low-power DRAM used in Nvidia AI CPUs also contributing above-consensus price performance.
Despite the scale of the headline numbers, the market's attention heading into Tuesday's release is almost entirely focused on a single variable: Samsung's progress in the HBM market. SK Hynix has dominated that segment, commanding roughly 61% market share against Samsung's approximately 17%, largely because SK Hynix's HBM3E chips achieved Nvidia qualification earlier and at higher yields. Samsung's HBM4 samples have reportedly begun shipping to major customers, and Eugene Investment & Securities estimated the company recorded favorable average selling prices due to early HBM4 shipments, but investors want explicit confirmation that Samsung is closing the yield and qualification gap rather than merely shipping pre-production samples.
The non-memory segments present a less favorable picture. Samsung's mobile and network division is expected to report operating profit down as much as 71% quarter-over-quarter to 800 billion won, weighed down by rising memory input costs that are simultaneously inflating the semiconductor division's revenues. The foundry and System LSI businesses are expected to remain in operating loss territory due to one-off costs and below-peak utilization on eight-inch processes.
For US-listed investors, Samsung's preliminary numbers serve as a direct leading indicator for Micron Technology, which reports its own third-quarter fiscal results later this month. The same DRAM and NAND pricing tailwinds that are driving Samsung's record results will be reflected in Micron's numbers, and analysts who have already raised Micron price targets sharply in recent weeks will be watching Samsung's figures as a further calibration of their estimates. The post-earnings reaction in Samsung shares is also expected to influence sentiment in Micron, SK Hynix, and the broader SMH semiconductor ETF when US markets open Tuesday morning.