Samsung warned on Friday about artificial intelligence chips’ sales weakness in this first quarter due to the export restrictions imposed by the United States against China, and while working to launch an improved version of its more advanced microprocessors.
In December, the US announced new measures to crack down on China’s semiconductor sector, including the restriction of HBM -type sales chips. The market expected Samsung, which depends on Chinese customers to about 20% of HBM sales, according to analysts, was reached much more strength than their peers.
“There will be some temporary restrictions on our HBM chips sales in the first quarter,” said Kim Jae-June, vice president of Samsung.
“We expect some impact on our HBM demand, not only due to US restrictions on high quality chip exports, but also due to a change in demand for improved chips from major customers,” he said.
Samsung, which started sales of 8 and 12 layers HBM3E products in the third quarter, said it plans to launch HBM3E products in March.
Nvidia’s executive president Jensen Huang said this month that Samsung has to “design a new design” to provide HBM chips to his company, Korea Joongang Daily said.
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Samsung said in October that it was progressing in the supply of HBM chips to Nvidia, but has not released any update since then.
Kim said GPUS supply restrictions are also generating delays in projects of some customers, which weighs on the demand for memory chips used on data processing centers servers.
Nvidia GPU chips are missing due to strong demand and engineering challenges in their manufacture.
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Samsung said its operating profit was 6.5 trillion wons ($ 4.48 billion) in the fourth quarter, a 29% drop from the third quarter.
The South Korean company said it expected limited growth of profit in the first quarter due to poor business chip business conditions, including demand for personal smartphones and computers.
Samsung has predicted that mobile market growth will slow down this year, as US political changes under Donald Trump’s command and “inflation must create a number of uncertainties and regret about consumer confidence.”
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Demand Recovery
Samsung, the world’s largest memory chip manufacturer, expects the general demand for the memory chips to recover from the second quarter.
Analysts say that Samsung’s results and stock price will depend on the company to provide considerable volumes of 12 -layer HBM3E chips for NVIDIA.
SK Hynix and the world’s largest hired chip manufacturer, TSMC of Taiwan, released records of quarterly profits this month due to AI boom, with SK Hynix exceeding Samsung for the first time.
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Samsung’s fourth quarter operating profit increased by 130% compared to a low base the previous year, when the memory chip sector was still fighting its worst recession in decades.
Samsung’s operating operating profit from Samsung fell 22%to 2.1 trillion wons in the fourth quarter compared to the previous year.
The chip division made an operating profit of 2.9 trillion wons, but this was less than half of the 8.08 trillion profit that SK Hynix, the smaller company, had in the same period.
