By Joyce Lee and Heekyong Yang 7/4 2023
SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said on Friday it would make a “meaningful” cut to chip production, following the lead of smaller rivals, as it grapples with a sharp global downturn in semiconductor demand that has sent prices plummeting.
The unusual output cut by the world’s biggest memory chipmaker - with no previous announcement recalled by Samsung officials and analysts - came after it flagged a worse-than-expected 96% plunge in first-quarter profit.
Samsung jumped 4.5% in early trading in the biggest one-day rise since September, while rival SK Hynix Inc’s shares surged 5.6%.
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Parin viikon kuluttua saamme tietää mitä vaikutusta Nokian näkymiin on puolijohteiden, muistikomponenttien ja vastaavien niukkuuden ja hintojen nousun muututtua nyt ylitarjontaan ja hintojen romahdukseen.
[Isot kaupat Intiaan ja Nokian katemarginaaliin yleensä, sekä millä viiveellä]
Tässä artikkelissa Samsung, jota pidetään tuon toimialan ilmapuntarina, kertoo puolijohteiden ja muistipiirien hintojen puolittumisesta.
Updated April 06, 2023 08:50 p.m. EDT
SEOUL—Samsung Electron-ics Co. said it expects a steep fall in its first-quarter profit, dropping to levels last seen during the finan-cial crisis as an extended slump in the tech sector hits its memory-chip business hard.
Samsung said Friday that its operating profit for the January-March quarter was expected to have dropped by around 95.8%from the prior year to 600 billion won, or roughly $455 million, in what would be the smallest quarterly operating profit since 2009. Revenue for the three-month period is expected to drop by 19% from a year earlier to 63 trillion won.
The South Korean tech company’s profit plunge comes as the global eco-nomic slowdown, inflation and geopolitical tensions have prompted pullbacks in corporate and consumer spending on the tech prod-ucts—including PCs, smart-phones and servers—that drive demand for semicon-ductors, including memory chips.
Samsung said Friday that it is in the process of lowering memory-chip production, joining its competitors in the memory business that have dialed back their investments aimed at capacity expansion and cut production to address the supply glut and defend profitability. The company said in January that it was optimizing its manufactur-ing lines, in what was seen in the industry as signaling some near-term production cuts.
Samsung is considered a bellwether for the global tech world.
- It is a major components supplier to companies such as Apple Inc. and is the world’s top seller of smartphones and TVs and a big player in many other areas of con-sumer electronics.
Samsung’s grim earnings forecast reflects a memory industry—notorious for its boom-and-bust cycles—that is going through one of its worst down cycles in years.
In the first quarter, Sam-sung’s semiconductor division—which generates most of the firm’s income—is expected to record an operating loss of 3.3 trillion won, according to projec-tions by Hong Kong-based brokerage CLSA. That compares with 8.45 trillion won in operating profit logged by the semiconduc-tor division for the same quarter a year earlier.
