Samsung's Preliminary Numbers Surge

Samsung Electronics released preliminary third-quarter results on October 8, with revenue up 126.59% year over year and operating profit up 782.5%. The full report and earnings call are set for October 29. Meanwhile, U.S. third-quarter earnings season gets fully underway next week, with Micron expected to contribute 19% of S&P 500 third-quarter earnings growth. The limitation of a preliminary release is the absence of segment data. Samsung spans memory, foundry, displays and handsets, and there's no way yet to tell how much of this growth came from memory pricing versus everything else. What actually validates the memory cycle is the October 29 full report — standalone memory revenue, the shipment-versus-average-price breakdown, and management's fourth-quarter supply-demand guidance on the call. Until then, treating this growth rate as a clean read on memory conditions isn't rigorous. The more striking figure is Micron's 19%. A single company accounting for nearly a fifth of the index's third-quarter earnings growth says this memory cycle is genuinely unusual in strength — and also that S&P earnings growth now leans heavily on one highly cyclical sector. The flip side of that structure: if the memory cycle turns in some quarter, what gets hit isn't just the sector but index-level earnings growth. It's a support on the way up and an amplifier on the way down. Do you see a major rebound ahead for memory? Between DRAM and NAND, which looks better to you?