Samsung Reports 42 Percent Jump in Profit

In an earnings report, Samsung said its net profit from January through March had soared 42 percent to 7.2 trillion won, or $6.5 billion, from 5 trillion won a year earlier.

Sales rose 17 percent to 52.9 trillion won. Operating profit was up 54 percent to 8.8 trillion won. Profit from the division that makes smartphones, tablets, personal computers and cameras accounted for nearly three-quarters of the company’s entire profit.

Samsung is the world’s largest maker of computer memory chips, televisions, mobile handsets and LCD panels. It does not provide smartphone sales figures, but it has increasingly relied on smartphones as its main profit generator — a strategy that has brought the company into patent and marketing clashes with Apple.

Samsung began sales of its latest Galaxy S4 smartphone in South Korea on Friday. It planned to introduce it in the United States on Saturday.

Samsung’s rivalry with Apple on the Apple’s home turf intensified as Apple reported its first profit decline in more than a decade. Apple also indicated it planned no major product releases until the autumn.

Samsung has challenged Apple’s once dominant place in the world’s smartphone market by flooding it with a range of models with a variety of screen sizes and prices and updating its versions faster than Apple ever has.

Samsung captured a third of the global smartphone market in the first quarter, according to data released by Strategy Analytics. Shipments of Samsung smartphones surged 56 percent to 69.4 million units in the quarter, it said. Apple iPhone shipments rose 6.6 percent to 37.4 million units.

“Although market uncertainties from the European crisis and the slow global economic recovery are still lingering, we expect to increase” spending on research and development “for strengthening our competitiveness ahead of planned new product launches,” Robert Yi, Samsung’s head of investor relations, said in a statement.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/business/global/27iht-samsung27.html?partner=rss&emc=rss