[Anchor]

Samsung Electronics has surpassed global big tech companies, including the world's top market cap leader Nvidia, to record the highest operating profit in its history. The company posted 89.4 trillion won for the second quarter, meaning it earned 1 trillion won per day even after setting aside 17 trillion won for employee performance bonuses. It earned more in this single quarter than it did in the previous three years combined.

Our first report today, July 8, comes from Jeong Seong-jin.

[Reporter]

Samsung Electronics announced that its preliminary results for the second quarter of this year show 171 trillion won in revenue and 89.4 trillion won in operating profit.

The operating profit is an increase of over 1,800% compared to a year ago, marking a record-high performance for the third consecutive quarter.

In just one quarter, the company earned more than 6 trillion won above the combined operating profit of the past three years.

This level is higher than the quarterly record operating profits of global big tech firms such as Nvidia and Apple, making it the world's number one record among private companies, excluding the Saudi Arabian state-owned enterprise Aramco.

This performance figure excludes approximately 17 trillion won estimated for performance bonus provisions for the first and second quarters, leading to assessments that the company effectively achieved an operating profit exceeding 100 trillion won.

The record-breaking performance was driven by the semiconductor sector.

As AI big tech companies continue to expand their astronomical investments, a semiconductor shortage persists, causing prices to keep rising.

Samsung Electronics succeeded in being the first to mass-produce the 6th generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM4), expanding its market share in high-value products, and is also benefiting from price increases due to supply shortages in general-purpose memory such as DRAM.

[Interview: Ahn Ki-hyun, Executive Director at Korea Semiconductor Industry Association: Demand for HBM has continued to be created, and while demand for general DRAM is maintained, supply has decreased. Therefore, a supply shortage has occurred in both areas.]

Although there are forecasts that the DRAM price increase rate will slow to around 15% in the third quarter, analysts suggest that the upward trend in performance will not break, as the supply-shortage market is maintained at price levels already nearly 10 times higher than last year.

[Interview: Kim Yang-paeng, Senior Researcher at Korea Institute for Industrial Economics & Trade: It has become more powerful as an industrial foundation than just being a core component. It has gone beyond being an essential good and is now becoming infrastructure.]

The market is also presenting optimistic forecasts that if the current trend continues, annual operating profit could reach 370 trillion won this year and 500 trillion won next year.

(Video Editing: Kim Ho-jin, Design: Park Tae-young)