SEOUL — Samsung Electronics Co.’s 005930, -3.16% fourth-quarter operating profits slumped as the company’s mainstay memory-chip and smartphone businesses grappled with a sharp drop-off in demand and high inventories.
On Tuesday, the South Korean tech giant reported a 69% drop in operating profit in the fourth quarter compared with the prior year due to a decline in demand for tech products including PCs and smartphones and the semiconductors that go inside them.
The company’s net profit for the last three months of 2022 rose 119.9% to 23.84 trillion won, or roughly $19.4 billion, reflecting a one-time tax gain from a recent change in South Korean tax laws regarding dividends from subsidiaries, Samsung said.
The weakness follows disappointing earnings from other industry peers such as Intel Corp. INTC, -0.75%, which reported a net loss for the October-December quarter last week.
Samsung’s operating profit for the fourth quarter came to 4.31 trillion won, around $3.5 billion. Revenue for the three-month period fell by roughly 8% from a year ago to 70.5 trillion won. Samsung’s full-year net profit for 2022 totaled 55.6 trillion won, a 39.5% rise from a year earlier.