Samsung earnings

Samsung, which reported earnings today, also said it would stop reporting sales data and forecasts for its mobile phones and tablets, “probably due to its continuing legal battle with Apple”, analysts tell The Wall Street Journal. The company did not provide phone or tablet sales data in today’s earnings report, the decision Robert Yi, Samsung’s chief of investor relations, said in a conference call with analysts was due to competitive reasons:

As competition intensifies, there are increased risks that the information we provide may adversely affect our own businesses.

And in the earnings release Samsung only wrote that “shipments of mobile handsets increased in the high-single-digit range quarter-on-quarter”. Per latest IDC and ABI Research second-quarter cell phone survey, Samsung shipped…

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Samsung today posted a 26-percent drop in Q2 profits because its television and semiconductor operations are shrinking. Profits fell to 3.7 trillion won, or about $3.5 billion, versus 5.01 trillion in the year-ago quarter. The drop is being blamed on Samsung’s flat panel unit which is bleeding money for a second consecutive quarter now. Because demand for 3D TVs and consumer electronics in general is weakening, Samsung’s flat panel division has generated an operating loss of 73.5 billion won ($69.1 million) in the second quarter, Bloomberg explains. Just a year ago, the same unit profited 880 billion won (about $827 million). Slim margins and low prices in the cut-throat television business don’t help either. A Kiwoom Securities Co. analyst Kim Sung In slammed the company:

Only the phone business is holding up. Everything else is looking bad. There’s no bright picture for the company looking ahead.

Maybe the flat panel division will recover if Apple brings out an intelligent, networked television set in 2012 using flat panels from Samsung? It’s all peachy for their mobile devices unit which has benefited from strong smartphone and tablet sales. A recent comScore survey put Samsung as the #1 smartphone brand in the US that accounted for 24.8 percent share of all mobile phone subscribers aged 13 and up. What about other metrics?

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