Samsung making rather a lot of cash

All thanks to its chips

Samsung is better than Apple at making money. Sure, it might not have margins as good as the fruity cargo cult, it might not make as much cash, but it appears to be unstoppable.

How many companies can have the majority of the press against them, produce a phone which caught fire, has its Vice Chairman and several executives locked up for corruption, and still make a pile of dosh which eclipses the sun?

Samsung Electronics is reporting record earnings thanks mostly to its chip division and the quarters ahead could be even better if its newest smartphone, Galaxy S8, is a success.

Samsung is seeing a boom in memory chips and a sudden spike in demand from smartphones and servers.

Shares of Samsung, Asia’s biggest company by market capitalization and the world’s largest memory chip maker, are near record highs after gaining nearly 17 percent so far this year, on top of the 43 percent surge in 2016.

Now Wall Street is expecting Samsung’s January-March operating profit to have risen 41 percent from a year earlier to $ 8.44 billion. That is Samsung’ highest profit since the third quarter of 2013.

The Galaxy S8 is out from April 21 so the most analysts are predicting even greater profits in the second quarter.

Analysts expect tight supply conditions for memory chips to continue this year, particularly in NAND flash chips used for long-term data storage, keeping Samsung’s margins padded. That leaves the mobile division as the key earnings variable, they said.

It is starting to look like the Note 7 fiasco only delayed Samsung’s march to dominance and the S8 will help Samsung regain its lead over Apple.

If you think all this is par for the course, imagine that if the press hated Apple, Tim Cook was locked up for cutting an illegal deal over a golf course with President Trump and the iPhone 7 caught fire,  It is unlikely that Apple would recover, let alone make record profits.