7.50am Business News

Adam Maguire is here with the business news. Don't know if Miguel was on a Samsung there, Adam, but, uh, they're in the news. Record quarterly profit driven by huge demand coming from AI companies. Tell us more.

Yeah, uh, seventy-one point five billion euro profit from Samsung in just three months of operation, really a staggering sum of money. For context, not far off the operating profit that Facebook owner Meta made in its full year last year. According to Reuters, it's the biggest, uh-

Did I read that, a hundred and seven point four trillion euro?

Trill-- No, trillion, trillion won.

Won. [laughs]

So it's seventy-one point five bill-- I mean, you know, it's still a lot of money.

Oh, well.

But yeah, not quite, not quite in the trillions. But still, uh, for, for three months of operation, it's incredible. So Reuters are saying it's the biggest, uh, tech prof-- quarterly profit ever. Uh, and it's all the more remarkable because to most people, uh, Samsung would be an electronics brand, so it makes phones, televisions, you know, kitchen appliances, and so on. Often products that are quite low margin. But really, that electronics business is only a small part of the, the empire. The, the real driving force is what's called its device solutions business, which makes everything from memory chips to hard drives to custom processors, all the things that power your phone, your computer, your TV, even your car nowadays. Uh, Samsung makes those components not only for its own devices, but for other consumer electronics companies, often ones it would be competing with on the shop floor. The likes of Apple, for example, would be a big, uh, buyer of Samsung components. Crucially, though, now tech and AI companies are rapidly building out data centers around the world. They've become big customers because they need those components to power the, uh, da- the servers inside their data centers. And because Samsung has the scale, it has the expertise, its sales have surged in recent years, making it one of the few companies in the world really that's profiting from AI at the moment.

Now, oil up again. Not quite a hundred trillion won yet.

[laughs]

Still pretty expensive, yes?

No, yeah, it's gone back up again. Uh, barrel Brent crude, a hundred and two dollars seventy-eight cent this morning. So not quite at the highs it was reaching last month, uh, but it is undoing some of the softening we've seen in recent days. It had fallen back to around ninety-seven dollars a barrel earlier this week, uh, which would have given a little bit of relief to markets. But as I say, back up again, uh, today, largely over, uh, c- supply concerns, uh, increased attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, though, produ- producers who might not have been affected by that aren't showing any signs of upping their output. Uh, the International Energy Agency had, had helped the market a little bit yesterday by saying its member states would accelerate the release of one hundred mill- million barrels of oil, uh, prioritizing, uh, prioritizing diesel. Uh, the mood, though, soured then when it clarified that that would not be additional output from oil producers, it would just