Samsung Electronics Co yesterday reported forecast-beating earnings results that were the best in two years as consumers snapped up its Galaxy smartphones in signs of a revival in its mobile phone business.
The South Korean company said its April-June net income rose 2 percent over a year earlier to 5.85 trillion won (US$5.17 billion), compared with 5.75 trillion won a year earlier.
That was slightly higher than forecasts, which were revised up in recent months to reflect stronger-than-expected sales of the new phones.
Analysts had forecast net income of 5.79 trillion won, according to FactSet, a financial data provider.
Sales rose 5 percent to 50.94 trillion won, while operating profit surged 18 percent to 8.14 trillion won, in line with the company’s guidance earlier this month.
Samsung’s mobile business reported 4.32 trillion won in operating income during the three-month period, its best quarterly performance since the second quarter of 2014, as the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones drove the profit gain.
The success of its Galaxy S7 smartphones boosted Samsung’s own component businesses.
Samsung said sales of organic light-emitting diode display panels went up, helped by healthy sales of flagship smartphones and higher demand for flexible displays for the S7 Edge.
“Looking ahead to the second half of 2016, the company expects its solid performance to continue ... mainly driven by earnings increase in the component business due to sales growth in high value-added products,” Samsung said in a statement.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained