Chip giants are releasing dangerous signals intensively. On the 7th local time, Samsung Electronics released its preliminary performance report for the third quarter, with a revenue of 76 trillion won, up 2.7% year on year; The profit was 10.8 trillion won, down 31.7% year on year. The complete financial report and the performance of each department will be disclosed at the end of this month.
It is understood that this is the first time in the past three years that Samsung Electronics' profit has experienced negative year-on-year growth, 8.3% lower than the market expectation of Yonhap's financial information subsidiary, Infomax.
Memory chip can be called the barometer of semiconductor industry. According to the data provided by Gartner Consulting, memory chips account for about 27% of the semiconductor industry's total revenue of $619 billion in 2022.
The World Semiconductor Trade Statistics Association predicted that in 2023, the growth rate of memory chip revenue will be the smallest among all kinds of chips, only 0.6%; Logic chip revenue will increase by 8.1%; The revenue of analog chips will increase by 6.4%; The revenue of sensor chips will increase by 3.9%.
With regard to the reasons for the decline in performance, the industry generally believes that it is mainly due to the weakening of communication demand under the global economic recession, the decline in the price of memory chips, which leads to the depression of the semiconductor industry and other factors. However, according to the Yonhap News Agency, Samsung is not considering cutting back on memory chip production.
Masahiro Wakasugi, an industry research analyst at Bloomberg, believes that the revenue of Samsung DRAM and NAND chips may decline continuously in the third and fourth quarters. Unless demand for smartphones and PCs rebounds, Samsung may reduce capital expenditure next year.
Star Electronics and SK Hynix have not disclosed their possible production plans. However, the Wall Street Journal reported that a senior executive of Samsung's electronic memory chip business said last week that the company's strategy was not to deliberately reduce production, and did not see the urgency of the need to reduce production immediately. SK Hynix refused to comment on the topic of production reduction, but company executives said in the second quarter financial report meeting that in order to cope with the market environment, capital expenditure will remain flexible.
