Samsung hit a bump in the road last year with the Galaxy Note 7 but the company appears to have well and truly recovered following the launch of the Galaxy S8. This week, Samsung announced its profit forecasts for Q2 2017, showing record-breaking numbers.
Samsung currently forecasts its quarterly profit to be over $12 billion, or around 14 trillion won. This would mark a 72 percent year-on-year increase and while the Galaxy S8 will have helped, a bigger chunk of the profits here actually comes from Samsung's display and chip manufacturing businesses.
This essentially means that Samsung's component sales to competitors is what will have helped bump its numbers up so much. According to current reports, Samsung is currently supplying OLED displays for Apple's next iPhone, though some production issues did ultimately mean that Apple also had to bring LG on board to help out.
Beyond that, Samsung has a deal with Qualcomm at the moment, with Samsung fabricating the Snapdragon 835 on its own 10nm process. Finally, DRAM and NAND orders will also be helping, with 9to5Google pointing out that Apple recently tapped Samsung for 3D NAND for the iPhone 8, in the midst of a global NAND and DRAM shortage.
KitGuru Says: While I'm not too surprised to see Samsung doing so well financially, it is a tad ironic that a large chunk of the company's profits are coming from competitors placing component orders.