Samsung reports 8 per cent drop in 2nd quarter profit

This will be the fifth straight decline of Samsung. At a media event in New York on August 13, Samsung is expected to debut the Galaxy Note 5, its latest phablet, and possibly a version of the S6 Edge, the Galaxy S6 Edge Plus, with a bigger screen.

Samsung said in the statement that supply issues concerning Galaxy S6 Edge have been addressed. The company also said on Thursday it will be flexible on pricing for its premium Galaxy S6 smartphone models to keep sales up.

Shares of Samsung fell 3.8 percent to 1,215,000 won in Seoul. It also expects high demand for its high-density DDR4 memory chips, solid-state storage products, and 14-nm foundry capacity later in the year. That can only mean a price cut for the flagship phone models, which are among the most expensive handsets now on the market.

In April, the company released its flagship Galaxy S6 and its curved-screen variant, the Galaxy S6 Edge.

Samsung did not say how many smartphones it sold during the quarter, but recent numbers from IDC suggest that the firm shifted 73.2 million handsets during the three-month period, giving Samsung a 21.7 percent share of global smartphone sales. However, net income rose 25 percent from 4.52 trillion won in the preceding first quarter.

At the beginning of July, Samsung revealed that it was expecting some deeply underwhelming second quarter results, and so it has proved. Samsung’s sky-high growth in the smartphone industry came to a sudden stop in 2013 as bigger iPhone models lured buyers from Samsung phones and Chinese phone makers squeezed its sales in China.

Operating profit was at 6.9 trillion won for the quarter, down 4 percent over the year, from 7.19 trillion won in Q2 2014. In the meantime, Samsung’s IT and mobile communications division “is expected to face a hard business environment” going into the rest of the year, the company stated.

The company’s cash position remained mostly the same, with about 61.8 trillion won of cash and short-term assets on its books.

The consumer-electronics division, which oversees TVs and home appliances, posted a 210 billion-won profit in the quarter, compared with 770 billion won a year earlier.