Photo illustration showing the Samsung Group company logo displayed on a smartphone screen.
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Samsung Electronics on Friday reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue, though its operating profit dropped sharply from the previous three months due to higher R&D expenses in its chips segment.
Here are Samsung’s fourth-quarter results compared with LSEG SmartEstimate, which is weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:
Revenue: 75.8 trillion Korean won ($52.2 billion) vs. KRW 75.4 trillion
Operating profit: KRW 6.5 trillion vs. KRW 6.8 trillion
Revenue rose about 12% from the same period from last year, while operating profit grew about 130%, year on year. However, operating profit fell nearly 30%, and revenue slipped by over 4%, quarter on quarter, amid soft market conditions and an increase in company expenditures.
Samsung shares fell 2.2% in South Korea on Friday morning.
Fourth-quarter revenue beatSamsung’s own guidance of KRW 75 trillion, while operating profit came in line with the company’s forecast.
Samsung is a leading manufacturer of memory chips, which are utilized in devices such as laptops and servers, and is also the world’s second-largest player in the smartphone market.
“Although fourth quarter revenue and operating profit decreased on a quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) basis, annual revenue reached the second-highest on record, surpassed only in 2022,” Samsung said in its statement.
For the full year, Samsung reported KRW 300.9 trillion in revenue and KRW 32.7 trillion in operating profit. In 2023, the company posted an annual revenue of KRW 258.94 trillion and an operating profit of KRW 6.57 trillion.
For the current quarter, Samsung said that earnings might be limited due to weakness in its semiconductor business but that it would pursue growth through AI smartphones and other premium devices.
“For 2025 as a whole, the Company plans to enhance technological and product advantages in AI, continue to meet future demand for high-value-added products and drive sales growth in premium segments,” it added.
Memory business
Samsung Electronics’ chip business posted an operating profit of KRW 2.9 trillion in the fourth quarter, down over 25% from the three months ending in October, while its annual numbers came in below that of SK Hynix.
This was despite Samsung’s memory business achieving a record-high fourth-quarter revenue of 30.1 trillion helped by demand for its advanced memory products used for AI applications.
“[O]perating profit decreased slightly compared to the previous quarter as a result of increased R&D expenses to secure future technology leadership, as well as the initial ramp-up costs to secure production capacity for cutting-edge nodes,” Samsung said.
Samsung and SK Hynix both provide DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, products — a type of semiconductor memory needed for data processing.
However, SK Hynix has left Samsung behind in HBM, or high bandwidth memory, a type of DRAM, in which chips are vertically stacked to save space and reduce power consumption.
According to Samsung, its memory business is cutting down legacy products to better align with market demand and increasing its proportion of high value-added products, such as HBM.
“In 2025, overall memory market demand is expected to recover from the second quarter,” Samsung said, warning that its earnings are expected to remain weak in the current quarter.
Smartphones
Samsung’s Mobile eXperience and Networks businesses, tasked with developing and selling smartphones, tablets, wearables and other devices, reported a quarter-over-quarter decrease in sales and profit.
Samsung said the performance was in part due to the fading effects of new flagship smartphone model launches.
The segment saw a consolidated revenue of KRW 25.8 trillion and an operating profit of KRW 2.1 trillion in the fourth quarter.
“However, on a full-year basis, flagship sales saw robust growth on the back of double-digit growth of the Galaxy S24 series featuring Galaxy AI, with tablets and wearables also increasing in both value and shipments,” Samsung said.
In the current quarter, Samsung plans to drive sales growth with new flagship models, particularly its newly launched Galaxy S25 series and will continue to push into the AI smartphone market.
Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.
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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday.
“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement.
The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China.
The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
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Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
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