Though it happened only briefly when it unveiled its latest smartphone, the Galaxy S26, Samsung (SSNLF +55.02%) crossed the $1 trillion market cap line on Feb. 26, 2026. It was the first South Korean company to do that.
Samsung's market cap tumbled over the next seven trading days to the $779 billion it is at at the time of writing (March 9, 2026). But it's likely to go back to where it was in late February and remain a permanent member of the trillion-dollar club.
And the catalyst set to drive its growth is one that will stick around for a couple of years, in all likelihood. Let's get into it.
Image source: Getty Images.
Heart and Seoul
Samsung makes such a wide range of products that describing its scope in a sentence can be difficult. Of course there's the company's Galaxy line of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and wearables. Samsung also makes a wide array of home appliances like dishwashers and vacuums. Its TVs and soundbars are well known, but it also produces semiconductors and medical equipment. It's far from just an artificial intelligence (AI) company, but it makes one particular component critical to AI.
Samsung's bread and butter is its electronics business, which includes semiconductorsand, critically, memory hardware, namely random access memory (RAM) and dynamic random access memory (DRAM). Both of these are in extreme demand due to the needs of AI.
And Samsung is one of only three companies that dominate the memory market.
According to CNBC, TrendForce, a Taiwanese researcher covering the memory market, expects average DRAM prices to rise 50%-55% over the first quarter of 2026. And in early February, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said that he expected the memory shortage to last for at least two more years.
That's bad news if you were hoping to upgrade your PC in the near future but great news for Samsung, which reported its Q4 2025 profits tripled due to the rampant demand for memory. That wasn't the end of the good news for Samsung in its latest earnings report.
OTC: SSNLF
Key Data Points
On top of its incredible profit growth, Samsung reported revenue of 93.8 trillion won ($63.2 billion) for Q4 2025, a 23.7% increase over Q4 2024. Full-year revenue totaled 333.6 trillion won ($224.8 billion), up 28% over 2024. Samsung also recorded earnings-per-share growth of 33.4% and a net profit margin of 13.6%.
It should come as no surprise that the fastest-growing revenue stream for Samsung is its memory segment, which accounted for a little less than a third of 2025's revenue and grew 23% over 2024, which is more than double the growth of any other segment.
And with memory prices set to continue surging, I expect Samsung's sales and profit from that particular business segment to continue growing. Give Samsung a look, it's set to make history as South Korea's first trillion-dollar company.
