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Samsung on Thursday posted another company record quarterly operating profit that was marred by a slight recession in its mobile business.
The South Korean electronics giant’s second-quarter operating profit for the period ended June 30 was 9.53 trillion won ($8.5 billion), an increase of 47 percent over a year ago, the company announced in a statement. Though the results were in line with company guidance issued earlier this month, analysts had been expecting an operating profit of 10.1 trillion won ($8.8 billion).
However, operating profit from Samsung’s mobile division, which accounts for two-thirds of its revenue, rose 52 percent to 6.28 trillion won ($5.6 billion) from a year ago but declined 3.5 percent from the previous quarter.
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Samsung, which released the GS4 in April, boasted in May of having sold more than 10 million units to retailers and wireless operators less than a month after the handset’s debut. However, worries that the company’s flagship smartphone was nearing market saturation led more than a dozen analysts to cut their earnings projections for the smartphone maker last month.
Samsung said it expects smartphone sales to be strong in the third quarter but at a slower pace.
“Entering into a typically strong season for the IT industry, we expect earnings to continue to increase,” Robert Yi, head of investor relations at Samsung, said in a statement. “However, we cannot overlook delayed economic recovery in Europe and risks from increased competition for smartphone and other set products.”
Before a slight decline in the first quarter, Samsung had posted a string of five consecutive quarters of record profits.
Apple, Samsung’s chief rival in the mobile industry, also experienced a slowdown in the smartphone market last quarter. On Tuesday, Apple revealed that it sold 31.2 million iPhones in its fiscal third quarter, a solid achievement compared with the 26 million units it sold in the year-ago quarter but a decline from the second quarter of the year, when Apple shipped 37.4 million of its smartphones.
Samsung’s semiconductor unit posted an operating profit of 1.76 trillion won ($1.6 billion), compared with 1.03 trillion won ($900 million) a year earlier. Operating profit in its display unit jumped 57 percent to 1.12 trillion won ($1 billion), while profits in its consumer-electronics division fell 41 percent to 430 billion won ($390 million).
