New flagships help Samsung report its largest quaterly profit in the last nine months

Starting from scratch and redesigning its flagship phones has led Samsung today to report its best quarter in the last 9 months. Samsung has reaped the benefits of strong sales for its metal clad Samsung Galaxy S6 and Samsung Galaxy S6 edge. The company reported profits of $5.64 billion USD for the quarter that ended last month. The mobile division reported operating profits of $2.6 billion USD in the same time period. That is the largest operating profit for the mobile division in three quarters.

Thanks to orders from smartphone companies, Sammy's chip business is in the chips, producing operating earnings of $2.7 billion USD for the quarter. But it is sales of the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Samsung Galaxy S6 edge that have the company expecting further gains for the April-June quarter. According to Samsung Vice President Park Jin-young, "Galaxy S6 sales have been going as well as expected, while demand for the Galaxy S6 edge have been better than anticipated." This confirms reports from earlier this month that said that Samsung brass have been caught by surprise at the success of the Galaxy S6 edge and hadn't ordered enough units of the device initially. But Samsung executives say that this supply issue will be fixed in the current quarter.

Samsung is guiding analysts to expect a slight gain in earnings for the next quarter and is telling them to be cautious about the second half of the year. 49 analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect Samsung to earn $26 billion USD for 2015, up from the $23.5 billion earned in 2014. The manufacturer sees the second half of the year, normally a time of strength in the industry thanks to the holiday shopping season, negatively impacted by a weaker Euro and Emerging Market currencies. Still, Samsung expects to sell 70 million units of the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge combined for this year, which would be a record for the Galaxy S series.

source: Reuters