Was Samsung 2016’s biggest tech loser? Maybe in the eyes of certain market analysts, pundits and editorialists, as various surveys actually suggested little brand trust impact, even in the short term, caused by the highly publicized Galaxy Note 7 QA fiasco, while the company’s financials appear to have swiftly rebounded.
The final Q4 2016 results are obviously not in yet, and the chaebol’s previous quarterly earnings guidance turned out to be way off the mark, but there’s no conceivable reason to doubt the general accuracy of newly released predictions.
As such, believe it or not, Samsung is looking at a three-year high consolidated operating profit of around 9.2 trillion Korean won ($7.7 billion), substantially up from both Note 7-influenced Q3 scores of 5.2 trillion won, and a 6.14 trillion won tally back in Q4 2015 that wasn’t bogged down by scandalous recalls.
Where is all this profit coming from, without a fancy new S Pen phablet hero to sell like hotcakes, and various damage control measures still costing a pretty penny? Well, technically, Samsung already wrote off the bulk of the ill-fated phone’s direct and indirect losses, with the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge presumably back not just in the spotlight, but on many people’s holiday shopping lists.
Then you have memory chips, OLED screens and stuff like that which probably surpassed expectations, with the company’s semiconductor division singled out as the quarter’s top performer by most analysts. And yes, Q4 sales were of course on a sequential rise, from roughly 48 trillion won in Q3 to approximately 53 trillion between October and December 2016, which is however an exact match for Q4 2015 figures.
In total, Samsung projects 2016 consolidated sales to reach 201.54 trillion Korean won, with a full-year profit of a little over 29 trillion, up from 200.65 and 26.41 trillion respectively in 2015.
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