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Samsung Hits $61B in Revenue for Another Record Quarter

Sales of chips and the new Galaxy S22 phones help the company hit its third straight quarter of record revenue.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Steven Musil
2 min read
The Samsung Galaxy S22

The Samsung Galaxy S22 came out in February.

Richard Peterson/CNET

Samsung posted record revenue during its first quarter, boosted by strong sales of memory chips and its latest flagship phones.

The Korean electronics giant said Wednesday that its revenue for the three-month period ended March 31 came in at 77.78 trillion won ($61.4 billion), an increase of nearly 19% over the same quarter last year. It's the company's third straight quarter of record revenue and narrowly edged out Samsung's fourth-quarter results as the record holder. 

The company's operating profit of 14.1 trillion won ($11.2 billion) represented an increase of 51% year over year.

Samsung sells more phones and TVs than any other company, but it also has a huge business selling memory chips to device makers around the globe. In recent quarters, Samsung's chip business has gotten a boost from data centers that rely on the technology to store everything we're doing online.

The company credited strong sales of the Galaxy S22 Ultra and mass market 5G models with helping boost revenue in its mobile division by 11% over the first quarter of 2021. The Galaxy S22 lineup, which features several major camera improvements, was unveiled in early February and landed on retail shelves later that month.

Though the phones were hampered by major stocking and back-order issues when they first hit stores, the situation has improved since then, though some colors and configurations are still on back order. Samsung said it expects revenue in mobile to grow "significantly" on the sales of the Galaxy S22 series and higher sales of new mass market 5G models.

Samsung said a solid demand for memory chips for servers helped it achieve a record high in sales, up 39% year over year. The company said it expects its memory business to benefit from continued strong demand of server chips, and it plans to increase sales of next-generation interfaces, such as DDR5 and LPDDR5.