Samsung jumps 9.01% on eve of earnings call

Samsung Electronics shares climbed 9.01% on Wednesday, October 28, closing at 242,000 won against 222,000 won a session earlier. No single day had brought a larger gain for the stock since August 20, when it advanced 9.49%. The jump came one day before the company’s conference call on third-quarter results.

Korea’s main index moved with it. The KOSPI ended 6.63% higher at 6,012.44. The Chosun Daily reported that the rally in Samsung and SK hynix carried the index past the 6,000 level. The newspaper linked the move in chip stocks to a forecast that memory supply will stay short until 2030. It did not say who made that forecast.

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Stronger than the broad market

Samsung outran the rest of the market. The TIGER 200 fund gained 7.5% over the same session, from the October 27 close to the October 28 close.

The company’s weight makes its daily swings matter to anyone holding Korean index products. At the close, Samsung was worth 1,414.8 trillion won. That equaled 30.83% of the combined market value of the KOSPI 200.

For an investor counting in dollars, the closing price works out to about US$180.91, using the Bank of Korea rate of 1,337.7 won per dollar for October 28. Measured in dollars, the one-session gain was 7.87%. There are several ways to own Samsung from outside Korea, and each is affected by the currency in its own way.

Foreign money was already flowing into Korean equities the day before. On October 27, foreign investors made net purchases of 590.9 billion won (about US$446 million) across all KOSPI shares. That total covers the whole market, not Samsung alone.

Still short of where October began

The rebound leaves much of the month’s damage in place. From October 7 to October 28, the stock lost 9.87%, or 9.68% in dollar terms. Across the last 20 sessions it is down 10.37%.

The worst of that came on October 15. That day the shares fell 9.48%, from 232,000 won to 210,000 won. Wednesday’s close sits above that low but below the level held before it.

The gap between the two large moves is also telling. Forty-four sessions passed between the August 20 rise and this one, so a daily gain of this size is uncommon for a stock of Samsung’s weight.

Results call on Thursday morning

Samsung holds a conference call on its third-quarter 2026 results at 10:00 KST on October 29. Investors already have the company’s early estimate, filed on October 8. On a consolidated basis, it put revenue at 195 trillion won (about US$145.8 billion) and operating profit at 107.4 trillion won (about US$80.3 billion).

That operating profit was 20.01% above the second quarter. It was also 782.5% above the same quarter of 2025. It is the highest quarterly figure in at least six quarters. The October 8 numbers are preliminary, and the call is where the company gives its full account of the period.

Prices for the memory chips Samsung makes have been rising across Korea’s exports. The Bank of Korea’s export price index for DRAM, measured in US dollars with 2020 set at 100, stood at 289.16 in September 2026. That was up 2.26% from August and 247.72% from September 2025. The index tracks Korea’s national export prices, not the prices Samsung itself charges.

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Information only, not investment advice.