Record figures aren’t enough for Samsung and TSMC: they’ve been hit on the stock market
The South Korean company posted an operating profit of $80 billion for the quarter. At the same time, the chip manufacturer announced that its quarterly revenue had risen by 51 per cent
What if record profits, driven by artificial intelligence, were no longer enough for the market? It’s a legitimate question, given what happened yesterday. Because two chip giants, Samsung and TSMC, reported impressive figures, which nevertheless left the stock markets rather unimpressed.
The figures are as follows: Samsung Electronics closed the July–September quarter with a preliminary operating profit of 107,400 billion won, approximately 80 billion dollars. This is almost nine times the figure from a year ago. At the same time, TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer (which also produces chips for Nvidia and Apple), reported a 51 per cent increase in quarterly revenue. In September alone, the Taiwanese group’s turnover stood at around 511.86 billion New Taiwan dollars, up 54.6 per cent compared with September 2025.
Yet in Seoul, Samsung shares fell by 2.4 per cent. TSMC also traded in negative territory.
According to analysts, there are at least two reasons for this. The first lies in the figures: Samsung fell just short of the average of analysts’ estimates, despite the record results and despite revenues having more than doubled. The second concerns the future, because the market has been wondering for months how long this boundless spending on infrastructure – increasingly financed by debt – can last, whilst the cost of borrowing is rising in many economies. These doubts are not helped by a report in the Financial Times. According to the British newspaper, OpenAI has informed investors that in September its annualised revenue was approaching $50 billion – some $20 billion less than the $70 billion that had been widely reported. And it is precisely the growth promises of groups such as this that underpin a large proportion of investment in data centres.
It should also be noted that demand remains strong. Major technology groups are competing to secure memory from companies such as Samsung. The most sought-after component is HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), which is installed alongside accelerators from Nvidia and its competitors, but flash memory and low-power chips are also in high demand. The analysis firm Counterpoint Research has also revised its forecast for DRAM prices in the third quarter upwards: it now estimates an increase of between 10 and 20 per cent on the previous quarter, compared with the 5–10 per cent previously indicated, as customers are bringing forward their orders.
