Samsung Electronics breaks into 'trillion club,' hits $1.06T market cap

Samsung Electronics’ market value exceeded the $1 trillion mark on Wednesday, making it only the second Asian company to do so after Taiwan’s TSMC.

Samsung Electronics’ shares reached a historic high during Wednesday’s trading after  surging nearly 15 percent compared to the previous session, according to Bloomberg and Korea Exchange.

As of 12:08 p.m., Samsung Electronics’ shares were trading at 264,000 won ($181), up 13.55 percent from the previous session. It buoyed the company’s market value to roughly 1.54 quadrillion won ($1.06 trillion).

That milestone carries outsized symbolic weight in global markets, allowing Korea’s leading chip company to join the so-called trillion club. Samsung Electronics is now one of just 13 companies worldwide to hold such a record.

The rally has also reshaped the global rankings. Samsung Electronics climbed to 11th place by market value, overtaking Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and U.S. retail giant Walmart.

The gap with 10th-ranked Tesla, valued at $1.46 trillion, stands at about $300 billion. Nvidia remains the world’s most valuable company at around $4.7 trillion, followed by Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Samsung Electronics appears poised to break into the global top 10, market observers say.

The company seemingly has room to move 30 percent upward over the next 12 months, according to Bloomberg.

The company’s current share price stands at about 5.3 compared to the forward price-to-earnings (PER) ratio, a sharp drop from 14.4 in October last year, suggesting valuations have become markedly more attractive. The figure refers to a proportion of a company's share price to its earnings per share.

The low price-to-earnings ratio can be interpreted that the share prices are relatively depreciated, according to an explanation on Shinhan Financial Group’s website. The average PER ratio among Kospi stocks is 10. 

Analysts expect the company’s semiconductor division to deliver record profits in the coming quarters, driven by steep increases in chips’ selling prices amid supply shortages.

“The trillion dollar threshold carries material weight beyond the symbolism,” said Dave Mazza, chief executive officer at Roundhill Investments in New York, according to Economic Times. “More broadly, it reflects a market judgment that memory’s role in the AI infrastructure stack is structural, not cyclical.”

“If investors do some work on Samsung Electronics, we think they will conclude that the investment opportunity is attractive even if they have missed its performance up until now,” said Sam Konrad, an investment manager at Jupiter Asset Management, in the Economic Times’ report. “The memory market is currently undersupplied, and Samsung said that 2027 will see tighter supply and demand than 2026, so prices for NAND and DRAM are likely to continue rising.”

The benchmark Kospi index had surged 6.71 percent from the previous session, or 465.53 points, landing at 7,402.52 at around 1:38 p.m. 

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.

BY JANG SEO-YUN, LEE BYUNG-JUN [lee.soojung1@joongang.co.kr]