Samsung's H1 Sales to China Surpass U.S., Nvidia Absent from Top Five Clients
Nashnova编辑部
Samsung Electronics booked KRW 88.60 trillion in China sales in H1 2026, up 208% year-on-year, making China its largest market for the first time in a single half — yet the figure covers all business lines, and Nvidia is absent from the top-five client list.
How did China suddenly become Samsung's biggest market?
Samsung's H1 half-year report, filed August 14, shows China sales of KRW 88.60 trillion (up 207.7% YoY) versus U.S. sales of KRW 70.65 trillion (more than doubled).
This means → China overtook the U.S. as Samsung's single largest market for the first time in any half-year period.
A critical caveat: the figure covers all Samsung businesses — smartphones, appliances, display panels — not semiconductor revenue alone. Samsung does not break out chip sales by region, so the chip-specific contribution to China's growth cannot be isolated.
Just how profitable is the semiconductor division?
Samsung's DS (semiconductor) division posted H1 revenue of KRW 209.2 trillion, or 68.5% of total company revenue, and operating profit of KRW 142.9 trillion — 97.4% of total operating profit.
In plain terms = everything else Samsung does — phones, TVs, appliances — contributed less than 3% of profit. Semiconductors are effectively the sole earnings engine.
The driver: surging demand for HBM — high-bandwidth memory designed to sit next to AI chips — and other high-performance storage, while tight DRAM and NAND supply pushed average selling prices higher.
What happened to Samsung's memory market share?
Samsung's H1 DRAM market share rose to 39.4%, up 5.4 percentage points from 34.0% for full-year 2025.
This means → Samsung clawed back share during the AI-memory boom, driven by two forces: rising AI-server memory demand + higher average storage prices.
Samsung has begun commercial shipments of HBM4 to Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform this year and continues to expand capacity — its key lever for defending that share.
Nvidia isn't in the top five — what does that tell us?
Samsung's disclosed top-five H1 clients (alphabetical order): Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Hong Kong Techtronics, and Supreme Electronics (Taiwan). Together they account for roughly 25% of total sales.
Nvidia is not on the list. Samsung does not disclose individual client revenue, so absence from the top five does not mean its purchases are negligible.
This reflects the diversity of Samsung's revenue base: the biggest buyers are cloud giants (Alphabet, Amazon) and a consumer-electronics giant (Apple), not chip designers. Whether Nvidia eventually cracks the top five will be a key checkpoint for tracking HBM commercialization progress.
Content is for reference only, not financial advice.