Samsung Electronics released earnings guidance for Q1, with an expected huge year-on-year rise in operating profit attributed by analysts to improvements in the chip market, partly driven by demand for AI.

In a brief statement ahead of its results later this month, Samsung revealed its operating profit for Q1 would come in at around KRW6.6 trillion ($4.9 billion), up from KRW640 billion in Q1 2023.

Revenue is estimated at KRW71 trillion, up from KRW63.8 trillion.

The company provides little detail in its estimates, though analysts quoted by Financial Times, including Hana Financial Investment analyst Roko Kim highlighted strong demand for memory chips and associated higher prices for the jump.

Radio Free Mobile founder Richard Windsor said the preliminary figures confirmed “the boom in demand for AI is affecting more than just Nvidia, while a modest recovery in smartphones is likely to have added some icing to the cake”.

Windsor noted Samsung benefitted from positive trends in the consumer electronics segment, alongside demand for high bandwidth memory used predominantly in data centres and an “essential component of the AI training and inference systems built by Nvidia and others”.