Smartphones and tablets now 50% of Samsung's profits

Smartphones and tablets now 50% of Samsung's profits
Samsung smart to be on smartphones

Samsung has announced its latest batch of financials and it is good news all round for the company, with the Korean giant managing to reap in circa £2.9 billion in profit.

Proving how much of player it now is in the smartphone game, Samsung revealed that half of its profits came from its telecoms division, with the company's smartphones and tablets mustering 2.64 trillion won (£1.4 billion) from October to December.

This was down to its sprawling Galaxy line-up which also contains the Galaxy Note – a handset Samsung is hoping will usher in a new category of the mobile market.

"We are actually generating new demand in the Note category," explained Younghee Lee, a vice president in the company's mobile division during the earnings call.

"That will be continued based on our hardware competitiveness with the addition of brand and user experience."

TV watching

In all, Samsung's profit was up 17 per cent for the year and its revenue rose 13 per cent.

When it comes to TVs, Samsung sold 206 million units which is a little lower than the 211 million predicted but it did manage to bring this side of the business into profit.

In 2011 the display division managed to make an operating profit of 570 billion won (£323 million), which is up from the 2000 billion won lost last year, said to be due to the influx of smart and 3D televisions.

At CES 2012, Samsung announced the arrival of big-screen OLED TVs and said that it would be bringing voice and gesture control to its television line-up this year.

As for the Samsung Galaxy S3 - it looks likely that we won't see this phone for a while as it looks likely to be a no-show at MWC 2012.

Via Reuters

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.