Thursday, July 7, 2011

Samsung's Q2 profit drops 26 percent due to sluggish TV sales, demand for phones explodes

You may or may not have noticed, but we're once again in the thick of earnings season, and today Samsung's in the hot seat. The company has reported that its second-quarter profit fell 26 percent year-over-year to 3.7 trillion won ($3.5 billion), largely thanks to underwhelming sales of flat screen TVs and, to a lesser extent, semiconductors. That's a shade worse than the whiz kids over on Wall Street were expecting, according to Bloomberg. In fact, the demand for televisions was so disappointing that it overshadowed what was actually an impressive quarter for the outfit's mobile division -- sales of feature and smartphones quadrupled year-over-year to 19.2 million units, putting the company on track to further narrow the gap with Nokia, the world's bestselling handset maker. All told, this balanced out to a modest growth in revenue -- an uptick of 2.9 percent to 39 trillion won ($36.7 billion). Makes sense to us -- handsets aren't exactly big ticket items, ya know?

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