Samsung’s semiconductor business breaks 100 trillion won in profit in Q3, a new record - Hankyoreh : English Edition

Samsung's 100-trillion-won quarterly profit is not a cyclical blip—it is the structural migration of HBM pricing power from cost-plus to scarcity premium. After the 2023 NAND price war bled the industry dry, AI accelerator demand for HBM3E has rewritten profit allocation. Samsung's 1c-node yield edge and TSV stacking capacity are replicating the 2017 DRAM supercycle's monopolistic pricing dynamics. Upstream, ASML's High-NA EUV backlog and Lam Research's 3D NAND etch orders will absorb Samsung's 2025 capex uplift. Downstream, NVIDIA and AMD face compressed bargaining leverage on HBM procurement; the real 2026 battleground is custom Base Die IP, not commodity bandwidth. SK Hynix's window is closing fast. Its HBM share lead is being eroded by Samsung's production elasticity. If it fails to secure HBM4 CoWoS packaging capacity by Q4, 2026 will trap it in a technically-ahead-but-scale-behind bind. Micron will likely pivot to differentiated yield rather than a frontal price war. The 12-to-24-month pivot: P4/P5 ramp cadence in Pyeongtaek. If HBM4 yield clears 85 percent by Q2 2025, memory enters a demand-pull plus supply-constraint double-boost. Conversely, if CXMT scales 17nm DDR5, the commodity DRAM floor collapses, and Samsung's moat narrows to the HBM lane alone.