Samsung Clears 100 Trillion Won and TSMC Revenue Jumps 50%

Samsung Electronics said in a regulatory filing on 8 October 2026 that it expects third-quarter operating profit of 107.4 trillion won, about $80.17 billion, the first time the company has passed 100 trillion won in a quarter. Reuters reported the same day that no technology company has previously posted a quarterly operating profit at that level. Later on Thursday in Taipei, TSMC disclosed third-quarter revenue of T$1.49 trillion, or $46.71 billion, up 50 per cent from T$989.92 billion in the year-earlier quarter.

The Samsung number is preliminary and carries no divisional breakdown. Operating profit would be almost nine times the 12.17 trillion won the company recorded in the third quarter of 2025, an increase of about 782.5 per cent, and revenue of roughly 195 trillion won would be up about 127 per cent from 86.06 trillion won, according to Samsung's filing as reported by Reuters on 8 October. It is the fourth consecutive quarter in which Samsung has set a record for operating profit.

Price, not just volume

Reuters attributed the scale of the jump to a deepening global memory chip shortage, with AI infrastructure investment outpacing supply growth and pushing chip prices up sharply. Tight supply of conventional DRAM and NAND sits alongside demand for high-bandwidth memory, the component used to feed data to AI accelerators. Neither Samsung nor TSMC has published a split between price and volume for the quarter, and that is the number that would settle how much of this survives a slower year.

TSMC reported revenue, not earnings

TSMC's release was a revenue statement rather than a results announcement, and the company gave no details or forward guidance in it. The quarterly figure of T$1.49 trillion, calculated by Reuters from TSMC's disclosures on 8 October, came in above an LSEG SmartEstimate of T$1.46 trillion drawn from 19 analysts, and above the $44.6 billion to $45.8 billion the company guided to on its July earnings call. TSMC gives that forecast only in US dollars. September alone brought T$511.86 billion, up 54.6 per cent on the year.

Full third-quarter results follow on 15 October, when TSMC will also update its outlook for the current quarter. An LSEG SmartEstimate puts third-quarter net profit at T$740.8 billion, up 64 per cent year on year, but that is an analyst consensus rather than anything the company has stated. TSMC supplies Nvidia and Apple, among others, and its $2.1 trillion market capitalisation makes it Asia's most valuable listed company.

The direction is consistent with South Korea's own trade data. As Parallax Nexus reported on 1 October, the trade ministry put September exports at a record $120.94 billion, up 83.5 per cent year on year, with semiconductors alone at $60.30 billion, and noted that contract prices rather than volumes were doing much of the work. Samsung's filing is the company-level version of the same effect.

Shares went the other way

TSMC's Taipei-listed shares closed down 1.35 per cent on Thursday ahead of the revenue release, with the broader market index down 1 per cent, Reuters reported. The stock is up 64.52 per cent so far this year, in line with the market. Samsung shares fell almost 2.5 per cent in Seoul on the day of its announcement and remain about 25 per cent below the all-time high set in June, according to MarketWatch on 8 October.

MarketWatch reported the same day that Micron trades at 6.3 times this year's earnings and SK Hynix at 7 times, on FactSet data, and attributed those multiples to investor concern that AI capital spending may decelerate in 2027 and that current memory margins will not hold against cheaper Chinese supply.

The honest reading is that these two disclosures measure different things and only one of them is profit. Samsung's 107.4 trillion won is an estimate of earnings; TSMC's T$1.49 trillion is turnover, and its margin stays unknown until 15 October. The strongest counter-evidence to a straightforward boom story sits in the share prices: Samsung came in ahead of the LSEG SmartEstimate of 106.1 trillion won and the stock still fell.