Headquarters of Samsung in Mountain View, California, on October 28, 2018.
Smith Collection/gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Samsung Electronics on Thursday reported a second-quarter operating profit of 4.7 trillion Korean won, missing expectations, weighed by a 93.8% profit slump in its chip business.
While Samsung’s second-quarter operating profit beat its own forecast of around 4.6 trillion won, it was a steep drop from the 10.44 trillion won recorded in the same period last year.
The South Korean technology giant posted a quarterly revenue of 74.6 trillion won, up slightly from 74.07 trillion won a year earlier and beating its forecast of 74 trillion won.
Here are Samsung’s second-quarter results compared with LSEG SmartEstimate, which is weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:
Revenue: 74.6 trillion won ($53.5 billion) vs. 74.43 trillion won
Operating profit: 4.7 trillion won vs. 5.33 trillion won
Shares of Samsung fell by as much as 1.79% in early trading.
Notably, its Device Solutions division, which encompasses its memory chip, semiconductor design and foundry business units, recorded a 93.8% drop in operating profit year over year.
Samsung Electronics’ chip business posted an operating profit of 400 billion won in the second quarter, plunging from 6.45 trillion won in the same period last year. Chip revenue fell to 27.9 trillion won, from 28.56 trillion won last year.
“Inventory value adjustments in memory and one-off costs related to the impacts of export restrictions related to China in non-memory had an adverse effect on profit,” the company said in a statement.
However, speaking in an earnings call, Samsung’s chief financial officer Soon-cheol Park voiced some optimism for the company in the near term.
“Despite ongoing global economic concerns driven by uncertain trade policies and geopolitical tensions, the IT industry appears poised for a gradual recovery fueled by increasing momentum in AI and robotics,” he said.
“In this context, we anticipate a rebound in our performance in the second half, following a bottoming out in the second quarter, with the earnings expected to improve steadily as the year progresses,” he added.
Foundry hopes, memory woes
Samsung’s foundry business could receive a boost in the following quarters from a $16.5 billion contract to supply chips to a major company in a deal announced on Monday.
While Samsung did not initially disclose the counterparty, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that it was his American electric vehicle maker, and that the so-called AI6 chips would be made at Samsung’s upcoming fab in Taylor, Texas. The deal could be even larger than what’s been announced, Musk added.
The main aim of the Tesla deal for Samsung could be attracting other potential customers to its foundry business, Nam Hyung Kim, research partner and equity research analyst at Arete, told CNBC.
However, “production costs at the Taylor site are expected to be significantly higher than those in Korea,” he said, adding that it is far too early to conclude the deal will improve Samsung’s position against market leader Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Samsung’s foundry business is currently at a “critical juncture between survival and profitability,” Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research, said in a pre-earnings statement.
Samsung, meanwhile, has been dealing with increased competition in its memory business, which makes chips used to store data in everything from servers to consumer devices such as smartphones and laptops. The company has traditionally been the market leader in the space.
But Samsung’s strength in memory is being threatened as it falls behind rival SK Hynix in high bandwidth memory, or HBM — a type of memory used for artificial intelligence computing.
A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month found that SK Hynix had caught up with Samsung’s memory revenues in the second quarter, with both now vying for the top position in the global memory market.
In the second half of the year, Samsung said it plans to proactively meet the growing demand for high-value-added and AI-driven products and continue to strengthen competitiveness in advanced semiconductors.
Galaxy sales lift mobile earnings
Samsung’s mobile experience and networks businesses, tasked with developing and selling smartphones, tablets, wearables and other devices, reported an uptickin sales and profit.
The unit posted an operating profit of 3.1 trillion won for the second quarter, compared to 2.23 trillion won during the same period last year.
Consolidated revenue for the unit reached 29.2 trillion won, up from 27.38 trillion won last year.
Samsung said that both revenue and operating profit grew year over year through robust sales of its Galaxy S25 series and Galaxy A series smartphones, as well as its Galaxy tablets.
“In H2 2025, the [mobile experience business] plans to continue a flagship-first approach for smartphone sales focusing on foldables and the Galaxy S25 series — while emphasizing the AI functionality of the Galaxy A series — to increase market share,” Samsung added.
Samsung successfully defended its leading position in the global smartphone market in the second quarter, according to a report from technology research firm Canalys, now part of Omdia. Samsung claimed a 19% market share by unit sales, predominantly thanks to sales of its Galaxy A series.
Coinbase shares fell Thursday as second-quarter revenue came in shy of analysts’ estimates. Gains in the cryptocurrency exchange’s subscription revenue failed to offset weaker trading volumes during the quarter.
In the quarter ended June 30, Coinbase net income rose to $1.43 billion, or $5.14 per share, from $36.13 million, or 14 cents per share, a year ago. Earnings in the latest period benefited from a gain $1.5 billion related its Circle investment and $362 million from its crypto investment portfolio.
On an adjusted basis, Coinbase earned $1.96 per share, topping estimates of $1.26 reported by LSEG.
Revenue rose slightly to $1.5 billion from $1.45 billion in the same quarter last year, coming in just under analysts’ expectations of $1.6 billion. Revenue tied to transactions came in at $764 million, missing StreetAccount estimates of $787 million.
Shares fell 6% in extended trading.
Analysts were anticipating a weaker second quarter in the wake of the market’s exuberance in the first quarter, when traders positioned themselves for the upside of the Trump administration’s promises to create more favorable regulatory conditions for the crypto industry.
As Washington’s focus shifted to tariffs in the second quarter, speculative trading by retail investors slowed across centralized crypto exchanges, while crypto ETF inflows and buying by crypto treasury companies supported prices.
Retail engagement and stablecoins
Coinbase reported that retail trading volume, which is typically more profitable than institutional volume, grew 16% year-over-year to $43 billion, but missed the $48.05 billion expected by analysts surveyed by StreetAccount.
Subscriptions and services offerings – which include stablecoins, staking, interest income and custody – grew 9% from the same period a year ago to $655.8 million, short of analysts’ projection of $705.9 million.
Revenue from stablecoins, which became a dominant theme and major driver of crypto market action in the second quarter, came in at $332.5 million, about in line with estimates of $333.2 million, per StreetAccount. That was a 38% increase from the same period a year ago and a 12% increase from the first quarter.
Coinbase has benefited from a surge in interest in stablecoins after the wildly successful June IPO of Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin. Coinbase has a significant revenue sharing agreement with Circle, wherein it keeps 100% of the revenue generated on all USDC held on Coinbase platforms, plus about 50% of all other USDC revenue generated on other platforms.
On Thursday the company said it will soon expand beyond crypto to offer tokenized real-world assets, derivatives, prediction markets, and early-stage token sales within the Coinbase app. The rollout will focus on U.S. users initially.
Coinbase shares remain higher by more than 50% year-to-date, outperforming the benchmark S&P 500, which the stock joined in May.
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Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman speaks at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on Dec. 4, 2024.
Noah Berger | Reuters
Amazon’s cloud group grew recorded revenue growth of 18% in the second quarter, slightly ahead of analysts’ estimates.
Amazon Web Services continues to lead the cloud infrastructure market, but is facing intensifying pressure from Microsoft and Google, as all three companies ramp up investments in artificial intelligence to take advantage of booming demand.
Microsoft and Google reported better-than-expected cloud results for the latest quarter, with higher growth rates than Amazon.
On Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said revenue from Azure and other cloud services exceeded $75 billion in the fiscal year ending June 30, with growth in the quarter of 39%. It’s the first time Microsoft has provided a dollar figure for the business. Last week, Alphabet reported revenue of $13.62 billion for its cloud computing business, a 32% increase from a year ago.
AWS’ revenue for the second quarter totaled $30.87 billion, Amazon said on Thursday. Analysts polled by StreetAccount had expected $30.8 billion. AWS now represents 18% of Amazon’s revenue.
The cloud remains a profit center for Amazon. AWS generated $10.2 billion in second-quarter operating income, trailing the average analyst estimate of $10.9 billion, according to StreetAccount. Amazon’s total operating income was $19.2 billion.
During the quarter, AWS said it would open a data center region in Chile before 2027, and PepsiCo announced a multi-year agreement that involves moving workloads to the Amazon cloud.
Coinbase is planning to expand its core trading app beyond crypto, the company said Thursday.
The newly imagined “everything exchange” will include tokenized real-world assets, stocks, derivatives, prediction markets and early-stage token sales. The new offerings will roll out in the next few months, first to U.S. users, followed by a “gradual international rollout based on jurisdictional approvals,” Max Branzburg, vice president of product at Coinbase, told CNBC.
“We’re building an exchange for everything,” he said. “Everything you want to trade, in a one-stop shop, on-chain. … We’re bringing all assets onchain — stocks, prediction markets, and more. We’re building the foundations for a faster, more accessible, more global economy.”
The expansion puts Coinbase in even closer competition with Robinhood, Gemini and Kraken, all of whom have recently opened tokenized equity offerings to users outside the U.S. CEO Brian Armstrong has said he has a goal of making Coinbase the top financial services app within the next decade.
Coinbase’s announcement comes hours after the Securities and Exchange Commission introduced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to “modernize” securities rules and regulations to allow for crypto-based trading activity.
Tokenization of stocks and other traditional, non-crypto native assets, has surged in popularity this year as the Trump administration has worked to roll back restrictive crypto policies from the previous U.S. leadership.
While trading for retail and institutional investors is Coinbase’s core business, the company is in the midst of a big push to amplify consumer engagement through new services, taking advantage of the new pro-crypto policies out of Washington. Two weeks ago, it unveiled the “Base App,” which it aims to make the West’s answer to a WeChat-style super app.
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