Samsung Electronics posted its best quarterly results in more than two years and it expects continued solid performance in the latter half of this year.
The tech giant said Thursday it posted 8.1 trillion won ($7.2 billion) in operating profit in the second quarter, an 18 percent jump on-year. Revenue for the quarter rose 4.9 percent to 50 trillion won.
The growth was mainly driven by its mobile business, which posted 4.3 trillion won in operating income. Its flagship smartphone Galaxy S7 series sold around 16 million units during the quarter, with premium model Galaxy S7 Edge accounting for more than 50 percent of the total sales of the S7 series.
The world’s largest smartphone maker by shipment predicted a continued rise in demand for its mobile devices in the latter half of this year.
“(Following the rollout of Galaxy Note 7), we will still retain the price of Galaxy S7,” Lee Kyung-tae, the chief of Samsung’s mobile business division, said in a conference call. “Through the consistent price policy, we will raise consumer and market confidence.”
“The launch of the Galaxy Note 7 in the second half and the price maintenance of Galaxy S7 will raise the average sales price of smartphones in the third quarter,” Lee added.
Samsung is also expected to have seen a solid performance in its memory chip segment centering on high-value products.
Amid growing demand for solid-state disks for computers, stocks were very tight at the end of the second quarter, but demand is expected to be stronger in the third quarter, the company said.
“We will unveil the 64-layer V-NAND solid-state drives (for the first time globally) this year. Demand for content, mobile platform and solid-state disks services is expected to rise although there will not be significant supply growth in 2017,” said Chun Se-won, the company’s memory business chief.
Its display division, which posted 6.4 trillion won in sales and 140 billion won in operating profits in the second quarter, is also expected to continue to grow, centering on organic light-emitting diode panels in the next quarter, the company said.
“With demand growth for organic light-emitting diode expected, we will continue to have solid performance by expanding sales of high-value panels such as flexible and high-definition displays,” said Lee Chang-hoon, an executive of Samsung Display.
By Shin Ji-hye (
shinjh@heraldcorp.com)