Samsung
Electronics echoed its rival Intel as it signaled a recovery in demand for personal computers. However, chip manufacturing is set to be the battleground between the two companies in future years.
Samsung
(ticker: 005930.Korea) is the world’s largest producer of memory chips and smartphones and has suffered from a slowdown in demand for consumer electronics after the heights of the Covid-19 pandemic. That looks to be coming to an end.
“Looking ahead to 2024, PC and mobile demand is likely to benefit from the arrival of some replacement cycles for products sold during the initial phase of the pandemic,” Samsung said on Tuesday alongside its earnings.
The company reported a net profit of 5.844 trillion won, or $4.34 billion, for the third quarter, down 38% from the same period a year earlier. Overall revenue came to 67.405 trillion won, or $50.01 billion, down 12%.
The recovery in PC demand is a cyclical boost for Samsung and its U.S. rival
Intel
(INTC), stock in which rose sharply earlier this week on similar signs of improvement. However, it’s also worth tracking the progress of their contract chip-manufacturing, or foundry, businesses.
While also subject to cyclical patterns, the foundry businesses provide structural growth as demand for the most advanced chips grows with new technology. Samsung also had good news there, forecasting that the foundry market would grow in 2024 due to a rebound in mobile demand and continued growth in high-performance computing for applications such as artificial intelligence.
Intel has said that by the end of this decade it is aiming to surpass Samsung to be the second-largest foundry player behind
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
(TSM). It has a long way to go.
Intel’s foundry process generated just $311 million in revenue in the quarter. Samsung doesn’t break out foundry figures from its wider semiconductor business but market tracker TrendForce estimates its foundry unit’s revenue came to $3.2 billion in the second quarter and it had a 12% share of the global market.
Intel boosted hopes for its foundry ambitions last week by disclosing it had signed up three customers in the third quarter.
Intel said those customers were for its 18A process, representing a 1.8-nanometer node—a categorization of the size of the circuitry on a chip—which is set to begin manufacturing in late 2024. Samsung is targeting 2-nanometer node manufacturing in 2025, followed by 1.4 nanometer manufacturing in 2027.
Samsung shares traded down 0.6% in South Korea on Tuesday. Intel shares were up 0.3% in premarket trading.
Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com
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