Mirae Asset Securities raised its target price for Samsung Electronics (KOSPI: 005930) on the 7th from 370,000 won to 400,000 won—an 8.1% increase—while maintaining its "Buy" recommendation. Based on the closing price of 255,500 won on 4th September, the implied upside is 56.6%.
The brokerage revised its DRAM average selling price (ASP) forecasts upward by 4.8 percentage points for 2026 and 0.3 percentage points for 2027. However, it simultaneously lowered its assumed exchange rate from 1,553 won to 1,400 won per dollar, which pushed its operating profit estimates down by 5.7% for 2026 and 4.2% for 2027—a structural effect whereby a stronger won erodes earnings when converted from dollars.
Mirae Asset estimates Samsung's quarterly operating profit at 10.6 trillion won in the third quarter and 11.8 trillion won in the fourth, with annual operating profit reaching 53.6 trillion won in 2027. It projects DRAM ASP growth of +16.5% quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter, +5.4% in the fourth, and +22.6% for the full year 2027.
What makes these projections striking is the sheer magnitude of the profitability inflection. Samsung's operating profit stood at just 32.7 trillion won in 2024 and 43.6 trillion won in 2025, yet Mirae Asset forecasts a near-vertical rise to 370 trillion won by 2026. The operating margin for Samsung's DS (Device Solutions, or semiconductor) division is projected to surge from 13.6% in 2024 to 70.5% in 2026—a shift that reflects how HBM-driven DRAM price inflation is fundamentally restructuring the cost economics of memory production. The scale of this upside stands out even against the margin trajectory of rival Micron Technology.
The central thesis of the report is that the technological evolution of HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) is reshaping the memory industry's competitive landscape in Samsung's favour. Mirae Asset projects that HBM's bit growth will reach +57% in 2027, with ASP rising +49%—vastly outpacing commodity DRAM, where bit growth is forecast at +16% and ASP at +20%.
The demand logic underpinning this view lies in the AI accelerator market. GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI's large language model unveiled on 3rd September, is specified with a context window of 1.05 million tokens and a "Fast" mode priced at twice the standard rate for high-speed processing. The longer the context a model must handle, the more memory bandwidth it consumes—exponentially so. In anticipation of precisely these workloads, OpenAI's proprietary ASIC chip, codenamed "Jalapeño", is the only AI chip currently in production to incorporate HBM4, delivering 216 GiB of capacity and 15.4 TB/s of bandwidth. That OpenAI has chosen to optimise for user latency and energy per request, rather than raw chip throughput, underlines a broader truth: memory bandwidth is the critical cost driver of AI infrastructure.
Samsung is also staking a claim at the frontier of next-generation memory architecture. While Nvidia's NVHBM, announced on 26th August, promises 30% more bandwidth and 15% lower power consumption compared with HBM4E, Samsung has unveiled what it calls "zHBM"—a design that eliminates even the power overhead of 2.5D horizontal interconnects. The zHBM architecture places DRAM directly on top of the compute die (GPU or other processor) in a fully three-dimensional stack, distributing I/O loads across the structure. Samsung targets a 70% reduction in I/O power versus HBM5 and more than 2.3 times the bandwidth, with the 100 watts saved redirected entirely to compute. Mirae Asset argues that as the means of achieving bandwidth improvements shift towards base-die manufacturing and wafer-bonding techniques, memory makers will gain increasing control over the industry's value chain.
That said, the bullish outlook carries risks worth acknowledging. First, any further appreciation of the won beyond the assumed 1,400 won per dollar would erode reported earnings more than current estimates suggest—a point Mirae Asset itself implicitly conceded when it trimmed profit forecasts after lowering its own exchange rate assumption. Sustained won strength would reduce earnings visibility considerably.
The persistent losses in Samsung's foundry and system LSI divisions are a further drag. Mirae Asset estimates operating losses of 6.9 trillion won in 2026 and 6.6 trillion won in 2027 for these businesses. Unless Samsung closes the competitive gap with TSMC in contract chipmaking, these divisions will continue to weigh on the overall DS segment's profitability. In HBM specifically, SK Hynix has secured an early and commanding position in Nvidia's supply chain; Samsung's ability to improve HBM yields and win over major customers will be decisive.
On current prices, Samsung trades at a 2026 forward price-to-earnings ratio of 5.9 times, falling to 4.0 times on 2027 estimates. Mirae Asset derived its 400,000 won target price using a sum-of-the-parts (SOTP) valuation that implies a total market capitalisation of 264.9 trillion won, divided across 6.649 billion shares of ordinary and preference stock combined. Average return on equity for 2026–2028 is forecast at 44%—far above the 13% average recorded over the past 15 years (2015–2025).