On Thursday, October 29 in Seoul, Samsung Electronics reported its fourth straight record quarter, with operating profit above 100 trillion won, a threshold Dow Jones says no major global technology company had crossed before. A day earlier SK hynix posted 83.33 trillion won of operating profit on 104.62 trillion won of revenue, a record 80% margin, and filed a plan to return about 100 trillion won to shareholders for 2026. The numbers are large. The more durable news is the calendar attached to them: SK hynix says its DRAM and HBM capacity through 2029 is practically spoken for, which turns the AI memory shortage from a cycle into a schedule of contracts.
Two quarters with more zeros than usual
Samsung's October 8 guidance put third-quarter sales at about 195 trillion won and operating profit at about 107.4 trillion won, against 86.06 trillion and 12.17 trillion a year earlier and 89.49 trillion of profit in the second quarter. Korea Times puts the gains at 126.6% and 782.5% and the profit at $80.28 billion. One quarter now exceeds Samsung's entire 2025 operating profit of 43.6 trillion won. Analysts estimate that memory alone earned about 110 trillion won, more than the whole group, because other businesses, the device division among them, were expected to lose money.
SK hynix grew faster from a smaller base. Its operating profit rose from 11.38 trillion won a year earlier, up 632% on the year and 38% on the quarter, while revenue rose 328%, per ComputerBase's account of the results. Both figures beat FnGuide consensus of 98.23 trillion won in revenue and 76.96 trillion in profit. The return plan pairs at least 30 trillion won of dividends with at least 60 trillion won of buybacks and cancellations; Dow Jones translates the total as $75 billion.
Micron, which reports on a different calendar, posted fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $54.23 billion on September 30, with an 86.8% GAAP gross margin and operating income at 80.7% of revenue, and guided to $61.5 billion for the current quarter. Margins like these usually belong to software. Here they are being earned by companies whose assets are factories; Micron alone has invested more than $49 billion in Taiwan.
Sold out, with an asterisk
ComputerBase's headline says SK hynix's DRAM and HBM are practically sold out until 2029. What the company said on its call, as ComputerBase relays it, is more careful: capacity through 2029 is practically fully covered by existing supply agreements and concrete negotiations with customers. Signed long-term agreements with 14 major customers, large cloud providers among them, cover more than half of production capacity for 2027 and 2028. HBM demand exceeds what SK hynix can deliver by more than two to one, and the company expects general memory shortages to last until 2030. Samsung and Micron, per Reuters as cited by TrendForce, expect supply to stay tight through 2028.
Prices are still climbing, if less steeply. DRAM prices rose at double-digit rates in the third quarter, slower than in the second, while long-term agreements spread. TrendForce's September 23 bulletin raised its fourth-quarter contract price outlook, noting that such agreements shrink the supply left to negotiate while new fabs lag, with PC and server memory leading the gains while mobile and consumer prices cool from high bases. SK hynix plans significantly higher capital spending next year and sees 2027 DRAM bit demand growing in the mid-20% range.
Where the market and the workforce push back
Records did not buy applause. Samsung shares fell more than 5% during Thursday's session before closing down 4.13% at 232,000 won, still up 93% this year. Dow Jones tied the drop to the shareholder-return plan: Samsung reaffirmed 90 trillion to 110 trillion won for 2026, with details due in early 2027, and a Shinhan Securities analyst saw no upside surprise.
Record profits do not guarantee a receptive market. Last week SK hynix stopped reviewing a US IPO for its Solidigm unit, weighed partly to fund a new American fab, citing market conditions and share price trends. Its shares were then down about 30% for the quarter, per LSEG data cited by Dow Jones.
The people who run the fabs have noticed the margins too. At Micron's Taoyuan site in Taiwan, which makes DRAM and HBM, a union called a strike for October 22 to press for profit sharing. 247 Wall St reports that workers want a one-off bonus of 83 months' pay plus 15% of operating profit, paid quarterly, having rejected Micron's offer of up to 68 months, and notes that Micron's annual report traces most of its 2026 DRAM output to Taiwan. We could not confirm whether the walkout went ahead. SK hynix, for its part, earmarked about half of the 20 trillion won buyback it approved on October 28 for executive and employee compensation, per its filing.
The bill arrives downstream
The clearest evidence of who pays sits inside Samsung. Its smartphone and networks business lost 0.7 trillion won in the second quarter, which Samsung put down to rising component costs, and the device division was expected to post a second straight loss in the third quarter. Some of that cost is, in effect, Samsung's chip business invoicing Samsung's phone business.
For engineers the bill comes through three doors. Servers, because server DRAM is leading the contract gains and cloud providers have locked up much of the volume. Storage, because SK hynix's NAND growth came mainly from enterprise SSDs, the data-center kind. Rented GPU hours, because data-center accelerators carry HBM, and HBM demand is more than double what SK hynix can ship. Laptops and desktops sit downstream of PC memory, which TrendForce says is leading the gains alongside servers. We have no clean figure yet for any of these bills; every input points the same way.
The 30,000-foot read
Memory was the textbook cyclical industry: build in the boom, drown in the bust. What changed this quarter is less the size of the profits than their structure. Demand has been converted into multi-year agreements with major customers, more than half of 2027 and 2028 capacity at SK hynix alone, while new fabs arrive on construction timelines no contract can hurry. That moves risk rather than abolishing it. Buyers trade price for certainty of supply, sellers trade some upside for certainty of volume, and shareholders, as Samsung learned on Thursday, grade the expectations as harshly as the results.
For engineers, the stoic move is to treat memory as a scarce input again, because it is. The cost of a model, a cache or a rented GPU hour is now set partly by supply contracts that run into 2028. You cannot renegotiate those from a terminal. You can write software that needs less memory. Watch for Samsung's detailed return plan in early 2027, SK hynix's 2027 capital budget, TrendForce's fourth-quarter contract prices, and whether the Taiwan labor dispute widens.
Sources: Samsung Electronics, Q3 2026 earnings guidance (sales, operating profit and comparisons; chart data); Dow Jones via MarketScreener, Oct 29 (final quarter above 100 trillion won, fourth straight record, first-for-a-major-tech-company claim, return plan status, share move, Shinhan view, $75 billion translation of SK hynix's plan); Korea Times, Oct 8 (growth rates, dollar conversion, memory profit and device-division estimates, DRAM price trend, consensus figures); Korea Times, Oct 26 (FnGuide consensus for SK hynix); TrendForce News, Oct 8 (Samsung's 2025 operating profit per Hankyung, tight supply through 2028 per Reuters); TrendForce DRAM Market Bulletin, Sept 23 (raised fourth-quarter outlook, long-term agreements, segment trends); ComputerBase (SK hynix results, margin, capacity coverage through 2029, agreements, HBM demand, shortage to 2030, 2027 demand, capex, enterprise SSD flash; chart data); SK hynix Form 6-K, Oct 28 (return plan and its split, buyback and its compensation share); Dow Jones via Tiger Brokers, Oct 2025 (SK hynix Q3 2025 operating profit; chart data); Dow Jones via MarketScreener, Oct 22 (Solidigm IPO review halted, share decline); Micron fiscal Q4 2026 release, SEC (revenue, margins, guidance); Reuters via Daily Maverick (Taoyuan strike call and timing, site products, Micron's Taiwan investment); 247 Wall St (union demands, Micron's offer, annual-report line on Taiwan output); Pulse 2.0 (Samsung's Q2 2026 smartphone loss and component costs). CAVEATS: Samsung's final October 29 release could not be opened, so its figures here are the October 8 guidance; Dow Jones confirms the final quarter topped 100 trillion won, and final numbers may differ slightly. SK hynix's own results release could not be opened either; its quarterly figures and every call statement (coverage through 2029, shortage to 2030, the 14 agreements, HBM demand) are company statements relayed by ComputerBase alone, and "practically sold out" is ComputerBase's headline, while the relayed statement includes concrete negotiations, not only signed contracts. The $75 billion is Dow Jones's translation; the filing states about 100 trillion won and calls it forward-looking. Samsung's closing price comes from MarketScreener's quote data beside the Dow Jones article, not the article text. Memory profit and device-division figures for the third quarter are analyst estimates. The strike demands are single-sourced to 247 Wall St, and we could not confirm the walkout or any production impact. TrendForce's numeric fourth-quarter forecast is paywalled and not used. The June hardware price increases cited in earlier coverage (Valve's Steam Machine, Apple's Mac and iPad prices) could not be re-verified for this post and are omitted. Corrections to the leads: no source we opened says Samsung's final results missed forecasts; Korea Times reported preliminary operating profit above the 106.64 trillion won consensus (LSEG's SmartEstimate was 106.1 trillion, per Reuters via TrendForce) with revenue below the 200.64 trillion won forecast, and Dow Jones tied the share drop to the return plan. The Solidigm decision was announced on Friday, October 23, in Seoul (late October 22 in New York). The 2029 claim concerns capacity covered by agreements and negotiations rather than literal sell-out. Nothing here is investment advice.