Hana Securities said on the 17th that next year's earnings for Samsung Electronics will grow on the back of strong pricing in the memory institutional sector. It kept its "Buy" investment rating and raised the target price to 155,000 won from 140,000 won. Samsung Electronics closed the previous trading day at 102,800 won.
Kim Rok-ho, an analyst at Hana Securities, said, "The price increase for memory semiconductors is larger than expected," and raised the initial earnings forecast. Kim projected the blended average selling price (ASP) of DRAM to rise 31% and that of NAND to rise 18%.
Kim lifted his estimate for Samsung Electronics' fourth-quarter revenue this year to 93 trillion won, up 23% from a year earlier, and operating profit to 18.3 trillion won, up 182%.
Specifically, on the back of server-centered order growth, operating profit in the memory institutional sector is expected to jump 97% from the previous quarter to 15.4 trillion won. Within that, the operating margin of the DRAM institutional sector is seen topping 50%, while the NAND institutional sector is also estimated to recover to around 20%.
By contrast, the non-memory institutional sector is expected to continue a loss at a level similar to the previous quarter. Kim analyzed, "While utilization will recover thanks to increased supply of system-on-chip (SoC) from key transaction clients, performance improvement will be limited due to unstable Production yield."
By institutional sector, the Mobile eXperience (MX) institutional sector's results are expected to miss prior forecasts due to cost burdens from higher memory prices and the product mix. The visual display and digital appliances (VD/DA) institutional sector is also expected to see lower profit from the previous quarter due to slowing demand and the impact of tariff.
Kim also projected that strong pricing in the memory institutional sector will drive earnings improvement in 2026. He said, "Demand for general server DRAM has secured medium- to long-term visibility as data usage increases with the spread of artificial intelligence (AI) and as replacement cycles arrive," adding, "With overall prices continuing to rise accordingly, memory companies still have room to raise earnings."
In particular, he added, "Samsung Electronics has the capacity to further expand DRAM production capacity (CAPA) among the three major DRAM makers, making additional earnings upside from expanded supply highly likely."
He also saw a steep rise in revenue from high bandwidth memory (HBM). Kim said, "HBM demand for application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) will increase meaningfully," and estimated, "Accordingly, Samsung Electronics' HBM revenue next year will more than double." He forecast Samsung Electronics' revenue next year at 438 trillion won and operating profit at 113 trillion won, up 32% and 169%, respectively, from the prior year.
Despite this earnings improvement outlook, Kim said Samsung Electronics remains undervalued, noting that on 2026 metrics its price-earnings ratio (PER) is only 7.6 times and its price-to-book ratio (PBR) is 1.4 times, highlighting its valuation appeal.