A trillion-dollar chipmaker just guided for roughly $59 billion in operating profit this quarter — more than Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) posted last quarter. That company is Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (SSNLF), which already out-earned Apple Inc. (AAPL) on operating profit in Q1 2026 and is now closing in on the world's most valuable company.
Wall Street is starting to catch up, and Goldman Sachs thinks the stock is still cheap.
Goldman Sachs analyst Giuni Lee reiterated a Buy rating, citing "solid fundamentals" in the memory business that remain intact.
Samsung's Reported Earnings Beat Apple: Guidance Targets Nvidia
In its most recent audited quarter, the South-Korean company reported operating profit of 57.23 trillion won (about $38 billion). That's enough to edge past the roughly $36 billion Apple posted in its latest quarter.
In preliminary guidance released July 7, it projected second-quarter operating profit of about 89.4 trillion won (roughly $59 billion) on sales near 171 trillion won.
That figure, if confirmed, would surpass the roughly $53.5 billion Nvidia reported last quarter, and it represents a nearly nineteenfold jump from the same period a year earlier, when Samsung earned just 4.68 trillion won.
It's Memory, Not Galaxy Phones
Samsung's chip division has been driving the vast majority of group profit, powered by an AI-fueled scramble for memory that has sent DRAM and NAND prices sharply higher.
"The beat mainly came from better-than-expected DRAM profit more than offsetting weaker-than-expected smartphones," Lee said.
The company recently became the first in the world to surpass $1 billion in HBM4 revenue, according to Goldman Sachs. HBM (high-bandwidth memory) feeds Nvidia's AI accelerators.
The market structure amplifies it: Samsung, Micron Technology Inc. (MU) and South Korea's SK Hynix control roughly 85% of the memory market.
Few suppliers, exploding demand.
Lee pointed to continued tightness in memory supply and demand and to multi-year long-term agreements with customers that should keep pricing and margins elevated, while flagging scope for higher shareholder returns as free cash flow builds.
Goldman raised its 2026–2028 EPS estimates and kept its 12-month target of 480,000 won on the common shares — implying about 62% upside from the July 7 close — and 360,000 won on the preference shares, implying roughly 80%.
The Cheapest Mega-Cap In Tech?
Here's the paradox: a company printing record profit trades at about 5.3 times forward earnings, versus a long-run average near 14 times.
The market is quietly pricing in that the boom fades, a fear rooted in memory's brutal history of boom-and-bust cycles.
Not everyone agrees this is a peak.
Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research, told Bloomberg TV on Tuesday that "you cannot do AI without memory," describing structural demand with an 18-to-24-month order backlog and placing the AI buildout in only its "third inning."
The debate now has a date: July 30, when Samsung's full Q2 results reveal whether this profit surge reflects a durable AI-memory mix or a pricing cycle near its top.
