Samsung’s Q3 2024 Performance: Strong Sales Growth Amidst Competitive Smartphone Market

Samsung just announced its Q3 2024 earnings results, revealing strong year-on-year sales and operating profit growth. Samsung’s impressive revenue was largely due to its device solutions (DS) division, which covers the company’s memory, system LSI and foundry businesses. Sales in this division increased by 78%, and profits increased by 200% to KRW 3.86 trillion.

More About the Samsung Q3 Performance

Mobile eXperience (MX), which oversees the Galaxy phones, tablets, and accessories, generated 2% more sales, but profit fell by 14.5%. Samsung’s mobile business remained steady in terms of demand for smartphones, but global inflationary pressures drained its profits. In addition to boosting profit quarter-on-quarter as some of the rising costs of materials were compensated by enhancing flagship devices, high sales were attributed to Samsung.

Samsung expects sales to pick up in the next quarter, aided remember the holiday season in the Western European and American markets with Black Friday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas fast approaching. While mobile device inventory rebalancing affected key customers’ purchasing, the memory business remained robust, benefiting from AI-related capital expenditures and server expansions by hyperscalers.

Though the global smartphone market has been recovering slowly, the third quarter of 2023 saw its best Q3 performance since 2021, with nearly 310 million units shipped. Samsung, meanwhile, retained its title as the leading smartphone maker, although it saw its market share slip two percentage points. Samsung’s lead shrank to a single point in percentage as it was neck to neck with Apple following the launch of the iPhone 16 series. Apple’s strategy of shipping older iPhone models like the iPhone 13 and iPhone 15 to India also bolstered its market share. In Q4 2024, though, Apple is expected to pull into the lead, but by a much smaller margin.

Chinese smartphone vendors Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo used different approaches to grow shipments. Xiaomi took advantage of its brand stores, Oppo was busy polishing their A3 models as rebranded affordable units in Southeast Asia, and Vivo came up on multiple fronts with midrange offerings in different markets. Asia Pacific and Latin America saw the strongest market growth, spurred by attractive pricing and channel incentives. For 2025, the picture is more cautiously positive, as demand in premium segment mature markets is likely to grow amid AI-propelled devices expansion and midrange replacements.

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