Samsung Stock Falls 3% Even as Profit Tops $80 Billion: Is a Record Quarter Not Enough?

Samsung shares fell 2.69% to 235,500 won by 10:11 a.m. Korea time on Thursday, shortly after the company reported a record quarterly operating profit of KRW 107.4 trillion, about $80 billion.

The stock had traded higher before the release, adding to a 9% gain on Wednesday that followed SK Hynix’s own record quarter. It turned lower once the results came out at 10:00 a.m.

Samsung had already estimated the same profit total on October 8, so the new information on Thursday was in how each division performed.

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Chips Earned Nearly Every Won

Revenue reached KRW 195.3 trillion, up 14% from the previous quarter, according to Samsung’s results. The Device Solutions (DS) division, which makes Samsung’s chips, generated KRW 106.5 trillion in operating profit. 

Its memory business set records for sales and profit, and HBM4 sales, a memory chip used in AI servers, rose significantly.

Samsung Display added KRW 1.1 trillion, while the company’s consumer device business lost money.

Phones and TVs Stay in the Red

The Device eXperience (DX) division, which covers phones, TVs and appliances, lost KRW 0.8 trillion. The mobile and networks unit lost KRW 0.6 trillion, after a KRW 0.7 trillion loss in the second quarter, according to Samsung’s Q2 results. 

Its revenue rose to KRW 37.7 trillion from KRW 34.1 trillion a year earlier, when the unit earned KRW 3.6 trillion, according to Samsung’sQ3 2025 results.

Samsung attributed the year-on-year drop in earnings to cost pressures, and in its Q2 report it had pointed to elevated component costs across the industry.

The TV and appliance unit’s loss widened from a slight loss in the second quarter to KRW 0.2 trillion. Samsung put this down to higher costs, including raw materials and logistics in its appliance business.

Investors were also waiting on a second set of numbers: how much cash Samsung will return to them.

Shareholders Wait Until January

Samsung declared a third-quarter dividend of KRW 4,601 per share, or KRW 30 trillion in total. It expects KRW 55–75 trillion of its 2026 return budget to remain, which will include a “substantial” share buyback and cancellation alongside cash dividends. The board will finalize the amount at a meeting scheduled for late January 2027.

A day earlier, SK Hynix announced a 100 trillion won return plan, and its shares rose 10.9%.

For investors looking past this quarter, Samsung’s memory business expects AI-driven demand in 2027 to far exceed industry supply, by a wider margin than in 2026. The company projects about KRW 84.4 trillion in capital spending this year, KRW 76.8 trillion of it on chips.

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