Daily Woody | Jul 7, 2026 — Samsung's record $58B quarter, stock falls anyway
Samsung Electronics on July 7 guided second-quarter operating profit of 89.4 trillion won (about $58.4 billion) on sales of 171 trillion won — up roughly 1,810 percent from a year earlier and its third straight quarterly record. AI-driven memory powered the jump, as DRAM, NAND and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) prices climbed together. Yet within minutes of the release, Samsung shares fell more than 5 percent intraday.
The headline number is hard to feel until you break it down. A single quarter's profit exceeded Samsung's combined operating profit for all of 2023 through 2025 (82.9 trillion won), and topped the $33.7 billion Micron and the $53.5 billion Nvidia booked in operating income in their latest quarters — though it ran roughly level with Nvidia's $58 billion in net income. Strip out roughly 19–25 trillion won in newly booked chip-division bonuses, and the underlying figure runs higher still. By any measure, this is among the largest quarterly profits any technology company has ever reported.
So why did the stock drop? The reading that dominated the market was simple: the good news had been priced in for months, and the release itself became the moment to take profit. The same memory cycle surfaced elsewhere on the same day — SK Hynix is set to list on Nasdaq on July 10, and Korea's parliament debated how to fund an 800-trillion-won chip build-out. Earnings, listing and public investment are three faces of one boom. What is worth watching is that the country's bellwether stock stepped back on the very day its profit peaked — a reminder that a record print and a rising share price no longer move in lockstep.
「Source ↗」 Samsung Global Newsroom · The Korea Times · TradingKey
SK Hynix, the world's No. 2 memory maker and dominant HBM supplier (about 60 percent share), plans to begin trading American depositary receipts on Nasdaq on July 10, raising about $28–29 billion (roughly 43 trillion won) via 17.79 million new shares — about 2.5 percent of stock. If completed as planned, it would be the largest-ever U.S. listing by a foreign company, topping Alibaba's 2014 NYSE debut, and would rank among the biggest share sales anywhere, alongside Saudi Aramco's record IPO. Proceeds fund fabs in Yongin and Cheongju. The aim: let global investors price the HBM leader directly and close a valuation gap with Micron. Dates remain tentative.
「Source ↗」 CNBC · Seoul Economic Daily
President Lee Jae-myung arrived in Ankara for the July 7–8 NATO summit — his first as president — to court the alliance's defense-procurement market. Seoul frames NATO members as the world's largest defense market, and Lee is to give a keynote at the Defense Industry Forum. European and Canadian allies invested about $574 billion in defense in 2025, up 20 percent in real terms. The goal, Seoul signals, is less about one-off arms sales than a lasting place in NATO supply chains and standards. Trump also attends, raising the prospect of a bilateral touchpoint. Lee visits Mongolia July 9–11.
「Source ↗」 The Korea Herald · UPI
As the July extraordinary session opened, the National Assembly's finance committee took a briefing from the economy and finance ministry on July 7. At its center is a government-backed “Future Response Fund” meant to bankroll three mega-projects, including an 800-trillion-won ($520 billion) semiconductor investment in the Honam region. A parallel July tax package is expected to tighten property-holding taxes and add a domestic-production incentive. The main opposition is boycotting the agenda, but the ruling bloc says it will proceed.
Honam (the southwestern Jeolla provinces) has long lagged the Seoul–Gyeonggi and southeastern industrial belts. Steering a chip mega-cluster there is as much regional-balance politics as industrial policy — which is why its funding mechanism draws unusual scrutiny.
「Source ↗」 Financial News
A revised information-network law took effect July 7, imposing liability for online “false and manipulated information” and requiring platforms with 1 million-plus daily users — Naver, Kakao, Google, Meta — to run reporting systems and publish transparency reports. Satire and parody are exempt. The ruling party calls it a fake-news brake; the opposition calls it a gag law and vows to rewrite it.
Korea is not the first to try this, and the precedents cut both ways. Germany's NetzDG (2017) drew years of over-blocking complaints and is being folded into the EU's Digital Services Act; France's 2018 anti-manipulation law was faulted for vague definitions; Singapore's POFMA put the judgment call in ministers' hands. Each began with real harms in mind, and each ran into the same fault line — who decides what is false, and how fast.
That makes the coming months a live experiment. The design questions that sank cleaner-sounding versions abroad — how tightly “false information” is defined, and whether an appeals path checks over-removal — are exactly the ones Korea has left to the courts and to follow-up bills. Global platforms will watch how a mid-sized democracy, deeply wired and politically split, actually enforces it.
「Source ↗」 Careyou News · Democratic Party
A Korean court moved to end the court-led rehabilitation of Homeplus, a major hypermarket chain, after it failed to secure fresh financing — putting tens of thousands of jobs and supplier contracts at risk. The National Assembly's political-affairs committee plans a hearing summoning private-equity owner MBK Partners and financier Meritz. For global readers, it lands as another chapter in the debate over leveraged retail buyouts and who absorbs the downside when they unwind — here, the workers and tenants who were never at the negotiating table.
「Source ↗」 Financial News
President Trump warned that Washington is prepared to “finish the job” if working-level talks following the June 18 provisional U.S.–Iran peace deal fail to produce an agreement, VOA reported. The truce has already normalized oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, but the follow-up terms remain unsettled.
The warning reads less as a sign the deal is breaking than as deadline diplomacy. The truce put out the immediate fire; the detailed terms are still open, and the phrase “ready to finish the job” is pressure to force a decision rather than a battle plan.
The question is whether Tehran treats it as a real threat or as domestic theater. As the clock the truce started winds down, both sides find it harder to step back — and that is the point where rhetoric and action tend to converge.
「Source ↗」 VOA Korean
A wildfire in the Pyrénées-Orientales region of southern France, near Perpignan, forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 people from villages close to the Spanish border, Reuters reported. Hot, dry conditions let the blaze spread quickly. With fires also burning in Spain, Portugal and Greece, the evacuation is part of a wider wave of summer wildfires across southern Europe.
「Source ↗」 Reuters (via CBC) · Al Jazeera
Trump said on July 6 that ending Russia's war in Ukraine is “much closer” than many assume, a theme expected to feature at the NATO summit. Yet around the same time, Russian missile and drone attacks killed at least 22 people in Ukraine, AP reported — leaving the diplomatic mood and the battlefield pointing in opposite directions.
「Source ↗」 VOA Korean · AP News (translated digest)
Aramco cut the August official selling price for its flagship Arab Light by $11 a barrel, pricing it $1.5 below the Oman–Dubai average, according to Bloomberg — its first discount on the grade since the 2020 pandemic price war. With the June U.S.–Iran truce normalizing Strait of Hormuz shipping, previously bottled-up supply has flowed back to market, and Brent slipped to around $72. Analysts read the move as defending Asian market share rather than opening a price war.
「Source ↗」 Herald Business · Edaily
Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together account for more than 40 percent of Korea's benchmark Kospi, a concentration that rose as both stocks surged on the AI-memory boom; SK Hynix recently overtook Samsung as the country's most valuable listed company, above a $1 trillion market cap. Korea's financial regulator has criticized single-stock leveraged ETFs tracking the pair. The upside and the exposure now point the same way.
「Source ↗」 CNBC · KED Global
Nationwide cloud today (July 7), with rain in places through the morning and afternoon-to-evening showers over the central region and inland southern areas. Heavy, locally intense rain is expected across much of the country through Thursday (July 9) — watch for gusts, thunder and lightning. Sultry heat continues. (Korea Meteorological Administration, issued 5 a.m. July 7)
| Tue 7 | Wed 8 | Thu 9 | Fri 10 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sky | Cloudy, rain | Cloudy, rain | Cloudy, rain | Partly cloudy |
| Low (°C) | – | 21–25 | 21–25 | 21–24 |
| High (°C) | 27–34 | 26–34 | 26–35 | 28–34 |
Rainfall (Jul 7) Seoul metro & Chungcheong 20–60mm (northern Gyeonggi 80mm+). Jul 8–9 Central region 50–100mm (southern Gyeonggi & South Chungcheong possibly 150mm+). Take care with low-lying flooding and road visibility.
For one day, Korean semiconductors ran through every page. Samsung earned a record $58 billion in a single quarter. SK Hynix prepares to raise nearly $29 billion on Nasdaq, in what would be the biggest U.S. listing a foreign company has ever attempted. Parliament debated how to bankroll an 800-trillion-won chip build-out at home. Ridden well, the memory supercycle has become the engine of Korea's economy. But the same forces read differently from another angle: the two chipmakers now make up more than 40 percent of the Kospi, and on the day its profit peaked, Samsung's own stock stepped back. The country's fortunes and its risks increasingly rest on the same two names. When one cycle can lift an index and expose it in the same breath, the reward and the concentration are two readings of a single bet — and the next quarter will show which one the market trusts.
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