The last issue

SEOUL (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics announced on Friday a leap of 52% of its profits in the fourth quarter thanks to the vigor of processors for computer servers and the improvement of the margins of its subcontracting activitiessemiconductors.

The South Korean group, world number one of memories and mobile phones, estimates its operating profit from the period October-December at 13.800 billion won (10.1 billion euros), the highest for a fourth quarter since 2017.

However, this result is lower than the Smartestimate Refinitiv consensus which gave it to 15.200 billion wons, what analysts explain, among other things, by the bonuses distributed to employees, marketing expenses for smartphones and launching costs of new flat screens.

"We have the impression of a big surprise because it's below consensus but I don't think it's as bad as it looks. Cela semble refléter divers coûts passés sur le quatrième trimestre", commente Park Sung-soon, analyste de Cape Investment & Securities.

"We don't know for the moment if there are differences compared to the volumes of planned chips," he adds.

The estimated turnover of the quarter is up 23% over one year at 76.000 billion won, said the group, an amount in accordance with market expectations.

Samsung must publish its detailed quarterly on January 27.

If the prices of the Memoirs fell on October-December, the growth of demand on the servers market benefited both sales of DRAM fleas, widely used in data centers, and NAND memories, which are used for storagedata in electronic devices, explain analysts.

The Samsung action ended up the day up 1.82% on Seoul.It has an increase of around 11% since the beginning of November, the market tabling on a less pronounced drop than initially expected prices for memories in the first half of this year before a rebound.

Smartphones for the group's mobile activity have reached around 67 million units in the last three months of 2021, compared to 69.3 million in the third quarter, estimates the research firm Counterpoint Research.

This activity has been recently integrated into a new division called "Device Experience" (DX) with televisions and other consumer electronics products.

(Report Joyce Lee and Heekyong Yang, with Choonsik Yoo; French version Marc Angrand, edited by Blandine Hénault)