Samsung May Report Its First 100 Trillion Won Quarter. Micron Stock Has More to Lose Than to Gain.

Samsung Electronics (OTC:SSNLF) will probably release its preliminary third-quarter results this week, and the number investors are waiting for is 100 trillion won. FnGuide's consensus for the company's quarterly operating profit was 106.94 trillion won as of Oct. 2.

This might top the record 89.5 trillion won Samsung made in the second quarter by around 19%. It may also be the first quarter in the company's history over 100 trillion won.

Brokers have been trimming the forecasts, though. But the cuts point mainly to a stronger Korean won, bonus costs, and losses at Samsung's phone unit -- not softer demand for memory chips.

And this matters for Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU). Samsung is one of Micron's two big memory rivals. Its numbers will be the first big outside look at memory pricing since Micron posted record results on Sept. 30 and forecast another record quarter. Micron shares trade near $1,075 as of this writing, about 14% under their 52-week high of $1,255.

Image source: Micron.

Slower price gains

Showing how much of Micron's boom comes from price, its DRAM revenue rose to a record $39.8 billion for fiscal Q4 2026 (a 14-week span ending Sept. 3), up 343% year over year and 27% sequentially. DRAM bit shipments grew by just a mid-single-digit percentage from the previous quarter. This was mostly driven by DRAM prices, which climbed by a percentage in the high teens. NAND prices rose about 30%. And Micron's non-GAAP (adjusted) gross margin hit 87%, up from 84.9% the quarter before and 74.9% the quarter before that.

But the high-teens price gain was a fraction of the one before it. In fiscal Q3, Micron's DRAM prices jumped by a percentage in the low 60s.

Management expects the slowdown to continue. Micron forecast record fiscal first-quarter revenue of around $61.5 billion, a 13% sequential rise. And because the fourth quarter was a week longer than normal, the weekly pace is faster still.

After this quarter, Micron sees higher gross margins for the rest of fiscal 2027 "with a more moderate rate of price increases," CFO Mark Murphy said in his remarks for the Sept. 30 call.

Put another way, Micron's guidance assumes memory prices keep rising, just more slowly.

What can Samsung's number show?

Samsung's preliminary report has just two figures, consolidated revenue and operating profit. Its July 7 guidance for the second quarter, for example, gave sales of around 171 trillion won and nothing on memory.

Still, I'd say the tech company's profit figure is mainly a memory number. Samsung's device solutions chip division earned 89.2 trillion won of the company's 89.5 trillion won second-quarter operating profit, and memory made up 120.8 trillion won of the division's 127.5 trillion won in sales.

But other things can cloud it. Samsung sells many of its chips in dollars and reports in won, so a stronger won shrinks the result. A Korean brokerage cut its exchange-rate assumption to 1,400 won per dollar from 1,440, a gap of about 3%.

Bonus provisions can raise costs, too. And Samsung's July-through-September quarter mainly overlaps the quarter Micron already reported, not the one it's guiding for now.

The division breakdown comes later. Samsung's second-quarter earnings call was on July 30, over three weeks after the quarter's guidance.

A big miss would matter more than a beat

IBK Securities, for one, cut its operating profit forecast by 12.8% to about 101.7 trillion won, citing the won and bonuses carried over from the second quarter. A result a few trillion won below consensus, then, could easily come down to currency and pay, not prices.

A number back near the second quarter's 89.5 trillion won would be tougher to explain away. With price driving most of Micron's growth, flat profit for Samsung might suggest memory prices stalled in late summer, right as Micron's current quarter started.

Samsung said in July that it expected spending on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure to keep the memory market "undersupplied" in the second half. A figure around consensus would largely confirm that, and it may support the pricing behind Micron's guidance.

But I don't think a strong number does much for Micron stock. Micron's fiscal 2026 earnings under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) were $74.33 per share, so the stock trades at around 14 times earnings. That's a price for profits investors expect to fade, and a Samsung beat likely won't change that. A miss that the won and bonuses can't explain is another matter. That result is the one I'd watch for this week.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Micron Technology. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.