SEOUL—A strong earnings forecast from Samsung Electronics Co. on Friday offered a fresh reminder of the company’s central place in the global technology supply chain.
Even with the recall of its premium Galaxy Note 7 smartphone in early October last year that cost it at least $5 billion, Samsung projected profits for the last three months of 2016 that would be the highest in more than three years.
The boost in profits didn’t come from its own lineup of premium smartphones, but rather from competitors like Apple Inc., Dell Inc., HP Inc. and Sony Corp., whose smartphones, laptops and televisions rely on components manufactured by the South Korean technology giant.
Samsung’s ability to shake off the recall of 2.5 million Note 7 smartphones last year shows how even when the South Korean conglomerate loses, it can still win. Samsung’s Friday forecast of 9.2 trillion Korean won (US$7.76 billion) in fourth-quarter operating profit also illustrates a shift in where tech industry profits originate.
As recently as 2014, Samsung’s mobile phones were the cash cow. But with consumers no longer snapping up new phones every year, the world’s biggest maker of memory chips and smartphones by shipments is finding that there is plenty of profit to be made in the parts of devices not visible to most consumers.
Global smartphone shipments have slowed sharply, falling to an annual growth rate of less than 1% last year, according to a recent estimate by research firm IDC, from 10.4% in 2015 and 47% as recently as 2012.
Even as smartphones were selling strong, Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung continued to pour tens of billions of dollars into investments in semiconductors and display panels to make phones run faster, hold more storage and offer crisper images. Recent advancements have made Samsung’s components more powerful than those of its competitors, making Samsung an essential parts supplier for many of its rivals.
This friend-and-foe dynamic means Samsung can profit, for instance, even when a consumer ditches a Galaxy phone for a competitor’s product.
“If Apple does well, Samsung benefits from that,” said Sanjeev Rana, a senior analyst at CLSA, a brokerage, in Seoul.
The smartphone slowdown, however, has left some firms vulnerable. For instance, LG Electronics Inc. said Friday that it expects to report its largest quarterly loss in seven years since the company shifted its accounting standard during the last three months of 2016. Analysts say the huge hit was most likely driven by its mobile division, which is projected to have bigger losses than its record loss in the previous quarter. On Friday, LG estimated that it would lose 35.3 billion Korean won in the fourth quarter of 2016.
Samsung’s recall of overheating Galaxy Note 7 phones last year attracted global scrutiny and has hurt its brand image. But Mr. Rana of CLSA said the Note 7 likely wouldn’t have sold more than 15 million units globally—a fraction of the more than 300 million handsets that Samsung sells every year. In fact, Samsung’s latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S7, showed surprising resilience in the Note 7’s absence, enjoying brisk sales during the fourth quarter, nearly a year after it was first released.
The loss of the Note 7 did dent profits. While the fourth-quarter projections were “quite a surprising number” to the upside, said CW Chung, a Seoul-based analyst at Nomura, success with the Galaxy Note 7 would have further boosted Samsung’s quarter, he said.
In line with its transition from a smartphone-driven company to a dominant player in electronic components, Samsung has also been intensifying its efforts to expand its capacity as a chip and display-panel manufacturer.
Last November, Samsung announced that it would invest more than $1 billion in its Austin, Texas, semiconductor factory to beef up its production of processor chips for smartphones and other devices.
Samsung is also investing close to $10 billion to expand its production of organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, displays that are thinner than traditional liquid-crystal displays.
Despite the company’s woes with the Galaxy Note 7, investors pushed Samsung shares this week to record highs. On Friday, the company’s shares finished 1.8% higher, giving it a market capitalization of more than $240 billion—about one-third of Apple’s market value.
