Samsung Electronics will release its preliminary results for the first quarter of 2026 on the 7th. Market attention is focused not just on whether the results are "solid" but on how far earnings have soared. Samsung Electronics set a record in the fourth quarter of last year as the first domestic corporations to achieve 20 trillion won in quarterly operating profit. Some in the securities industry are projecting that Samsung Electronics' first-quarter operating profit could reach around 40 trillion won to as much as 50 trillion won.
According to the financial information industry on the 6th, the first-quarter consensus for Samsung Electronics compiled by WiseReport is 117.1336 trillion won in revenue and 38.1166 trillion won in operating profit. As securities firms have been steadily raising their estimates recently, actual market expectations have climbed far above the average. Some domestic and overseas securities firms presented operating profit in the mid- to high-40 trillion won range for the first quarter, and the most optimistic see more than 50 trillion won as possible.
Compared with Samsung Electronics' first-quarter results last year, the shift in tone is clear. On a consolidation basis in the first quarter of last year, Samsung Electronics posted 79.1405 trillion won in revenue and 6.6853 trillion won in operating profit. At that time, the MX (mobile experience) institutional sector propped up results on the back of strong Galaxy S25 series sales, but major divisions including semiconductors fell short of expectations. After bottoming in the second quarter of last year at 74.5663 trillion won in revenue and 4.6761 trillion won in operating profit, a rebound began in the third quarter, and in the fourth quarter of last year quarterly operating profit surpassed 20 trillion won. The first quarter of this year is effectively the stage to confirm whether the rebound was more than a one-off.
The most important swing factor in these results is the DS (device solutions) institutional sector, which handles semiconductors. The market is paying more attention to how much profit the DS institutional sector actually generated than to how strong Samsung Electronics' overall results were. To gauge whether the DS institutional sector's full-year performance can lead to operating profit in the 200 trillion won range this year, the first-quarter report card is essentially the first real test. With the memory market recovery in full swing, how much shipments of high value-added products such as high bandwidth memory (HBM) were reflected in the results is cited as the key point.
This is also why securities firms' forecasts diverge. The unusually wide spread in estimates this time is because projections were raised almost daily as the first quarter progressed. Especially after mid-March, aggressive forecasts followed one after another. Daishin Securities estimated Samsung Electronics' consolidated operating profit for the first quarter at 45.2 trillion won. It projected 41.8 trillion won in operating profit for the DS institutional sector, with the memory business earning 43.3 trillion won and non-memory posting a 1.5 trillion won loss. Kiwoom Securities also put Samsung Electronics' first-quarter consolidated operating profit at 43.1 trillion won, with 41.3 trillion won for the DS institutional sector alone. It estimated 42.9 trillion won in memory operating profit and around 1.5 trillion won in losses for foundry and System LSI.
There are even more optimistic views. Meritz Securities projected that Samsung Electronics' first-quarter consolidated operating profit could reach 53.9 trillion won. Reflecting about a 1.4 trillion won loss in System LSI and foundry and 50.3 trillion won in memory operating profit, it calculated the DS institutional sector's operating profit at roughly 48.9 trillion won. This is the highest among forecasts on the market. If such a scenario materializes, Samsung Electronics would once again exceed market expectations in terms of scale of results.
Overseas securities firms' forecasts are not much different. As of March, Goldman Sachs projected Samsung Electronics' first-quarter consolidated operating profit at 40.3 trillion won. Citibank, by contrast, saw potential for around 51 trillion won as of early this month. Taken together, the relatively conservative range is 33 trillion to 36 trillion won for the DS institutional sector, the midpoint is around 41 trillion won, and the upper-end scenario is about 49 trillion won. That such numerical gaps exist for the same company also means this quarter's results are highly sensitive to multiple variables.
Industry watchers see the magnitude of price increases for commodity DRAM and NAND flash, the shipment contribution of HBM3E (fifth-generation HBM) and HBM4 (sixth-generation HBM), and the pace of narrowing losses in the non-memory business as the key variables behind the estimate gaps. A semiconductor industry official said, "It means securities firms' math changed significantly depending on how quickly memory prices rose, how much sales of high value-added products increased, and how much loss-making businesses recovered," and added, "With client inventory flows, shipment timing, and exchange-rate effects layered on, earnings forecasts are coming out differently by securities firm."