Samsung Electronics expects its operating profit for the three months to the end of September to reach 107.4 trillion won, about 61 billion pounds or 80 billion dollars, a ninefold increase on the same period a year earlier.
The figure is guidance rather than a final result. Major South Korean companies tend to release previews of their earnings to advise investors ahead of more detailed reports, and Samsung's full third-quarter accounts are due at the end of October.
It would be the company's fourth quarter in a row of record earnings. Samsung attributes the surge to demand for memory chips used in artificial intelligence data centres.
The company is one of the world's largest memory chip makers, alongside its South Korean rival SK Hynix and Micron in the United States. Between them they produce the chips that AI firms such as Nvidia depend on.
Samsung, which makes the Galaxy Fold and S26 handsets, is also expected to take a boost from the folding devices it launched in August.
The wider market has moved in the same direction. Global demand for chips that power AI development has lifted the earnings and share prices of manufacturers across the sector, and Samsung's own stock market valuation crossed one trillion dollars earlier this year.
The capital following that demand is substantial. American technology companies including Google, Amazon and Meta have pledged to pour more than 650 billion dollars into AI projects this year. In June, South Korea unveiled plans for at least 880 billion dollars of projects led by Samsung and SK Hynix to build out the country's chip manufacturing capacity. Rival firms in Japan, China and Taiwan are investing heavily in plants of their own.
One further consequence is already visible to consumers. A chip shortage driven by surging demand has led firms including Samsung to raise prices, making products such as smartphones and computers more expensive.
Set the two halves of that last sentence beside each other and the quarter explains itself. There is a shortage of chips. Samsung makes chips. Samsung's profit has risen ninefold.
The shortage is not an obstacle the quarter overcame. It is the arithmetic that produced it. A chip that has not been made raises the price of every chip that has, and the second figure is the one Samsung is paid on.
Read strictly, the revenue therefore has two components: the chips the company sold, and the chips nobody anywhere could buy. Only the first of them appears on a shipping manifest.
This makes the industry's announced investment harder to read than the press releases suggest. Every new plant reduces the shortage. The shortage is what the quarter was made of. On the accounts as published, capacity is a cost.
The theoretical optimum is easy enough to locate. A manufacturer holding a single chip, with a planet of data centres bidding for it, enjoys total market share, negligible logistics and perfect pricing power. Samsung has not pursued that strategy, and the record stands at 107.4 trillion won without it.
The preview mechanism supplies the last flourish. The record is an estimate, published by the company, of a number the company will itself publish three weeks later. For the moment the largest quarterly profit in Samsung's history exists only as guidance: a record held, at present, by a forecast.
The Department of Unnecessary Research observes that the shortage has now delivered four consecutive record quarters, and asks the one question the trend leaves open: what these accounts will look like on the day there are enough chips.