South Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics has recently reported its Q4 2023 financial results with a revenue of $198.2 billion, a 14.3% decrease compared to 2022. The full-year profit was $11.86 billion, down 72%.
If we look specifically at Q4, Samsung Electronics’ revenue was $51.3 billion, and the profit was approximately $4.83 billion. While the overall company made a profit in Q4, the 4 Vietnamese factories suffered losses.
Specifically, the total revenue of Samsung Bac Ninh, Samsung Thai Nguyen, Samsung Display, and Samsung HCMC CE Complex was $14.6 billion, with a total loss of approximately -$178 million.
It is the first time that Samsung’s factories in Vietnam have reported losses. In Q4 2018, Samsung Bac Ninh and Samsung HCMC CE Complex also lost around $0.8 billion, but Samsung Thai Nguyen and Samsung Display made a profit, so the total profit of the 4 factories still reached around $70 million at that time.
Going further back, in Q3 2016, despite facing a major setback with the Galaxy Note 7, which caused Samsung Bac Ninh to lose $105 million, the total profit of Samsung’s factories in Vietnam was still positive.
According to Samsung’s report, only Samsung Display made a profit of approximately $41 million in Q4 2023. Conversely, Samsung Bac Ninh lost $116 million, Samsung Thai Nguyen lost $89 million, and Samsung HCMC CE Complex lost $15 million.
This is also the first time that Samsung witnessed all 3 out of 4 factories in Vietnam reporting losses in a single quarter.
Despite the losses in Q4, the figures are not too significant, so the total profit of Samsung’s factories still reached $4.03 billion, and the total revenue was $62.1 billion, a decrease of approximately 15% compared to 2022.
Among them, Samsung Bac Ninh made a profit of $1.13 billion, Samsung Thai Nguyen made a profit of $1.72 billion, Samsung Display made a profit of $0.88 billion, and Samsung HCMC CE Complex made a profit of $0.31 billion.
As for Samsung Electronics, the parent company is facing unprecedented challenges. The profit in 2023 was the lowest in over a decade.
Samsung stated that their memory chip segment still experienced losses for the fourth consecutive quarter. A positive point is that their DRAM business was profitable in the last quarter of 2023, which reinforces the market’s hope for this segment to continue to improve as semiconductor prices rise and demand for strong memory chips used in AI systems increases.
In early January 2024, Samsung unveiled its latest flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S24 series, featuring Generative AI, marking the largest-scale application of the new technology in the industry.
Samsung announced that pre-orders for Galaxy S24 devices in the home market of South Korea reached 1.21 million units in the first week, setting a new record for the Galaxy S series.
The release of the Galaxy S24 comes at a time when Samsung is struggling with declining smartphone sales.
Last year, Apple surpassed Samsung to become the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer in terms of quantity, a position that the South Korean company held for over a decade.
