Industry sources revealed to Yonhap that Samsung achieved more than 18 trillion won ($12.2 billion) in operating profits during the fourth quarter of 2025, with the bulk of these profits relying on the Device Solutions division responsible for memory and manufacturing lines.
The division is expected to have generated more than 15 trillion won, a massive increase of 422 percent compared to last year.
Thanks to this huge jump, Samsung is poised to regain the top spot in the DRAM revenue market, a position it lost to SK Hynix in the first quarter of 2025 after 33 years of dominance. SK Hynix has taken advantage of the AI boom to expand its high-bandwidth HBM chipset business and achieve significant growth.
This strong return for Samsung is due to the continued rise in DRAM prices globally. The feverish expansion of AI infrastructure (especially data centers) has pushed memory prices to unprecedented levels, while Samsung is working in parallel to develop HBM technologies to approach the performance of its competitor SK Hynix.
For example, the average price of 8GB DDR4 memory exceeded $8 in November, an increase of 15.7 percent from the previous month.
The rise appears to be more severe when compared to March prices, which amounted to only $1.35, with prices expected to rise by up to 50 percent between the third and fourth quarters.
