South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co on Friday said its third-quarter earnings had almost doubled from a year earlier on strong phone sales, dpa reported.
Net profit reached 6.6 trillion won (6 billion dollars) in the July-September period, compared with 3.4 trillion won a year earlier, the company told regulators in a filing, state-run Yonhap News Agency reported.
The world's top maker of memory chips and smartphones said the growth came as strong sales of its top-shelf televisions and flagship Galaxy S3 phone, released worldwide in May, continued to boost its profit margin.
Sales jumped 26.4 per cent year-on-year to an all-time high of 52.2 trillion won. Operating profit soared 91 per cent to a record 8.1 trillion won, in line with Samsung's early October forecast.
"The business environment remained difficult with global economic uncertainties persisting amid the fiscal concerns in the US and Europe," Robert Yi, Samsung senior vice president and head of investor relations, said in a statement.
"However, we continued to break our quarterly profit records."
The company shipped at least 18 million units of the Galaxy S3 for the third quarter, while other smartphone shipments and overall mobile device shipments are projected to reach 59 million and 106 million units, respectively, according to an October 2 report by IBK Securities Co analyst Lee Seung-woo, Yonhap reported.
South Korea's third-quarter gross domestic product grew 0.2 per cent in the July-September period over the previous quarter as global demand for its exports faltered.
Samsung, the world's largest electronics company, accounts for about 15 per cent of the benchmark Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) index.
The KOSPI rose 0.55 per cent on Thursday, after four sessions of losses, but had dropped 1.26 per cent over the first half of Friday's trading.