Seoul, April 5 (IANS): Samsung Electronics said on Friday that its operating profit for the first quarter is estimated to have shot up more than 10-fold on rebounding demand for memory chips, beating market expectations.

The world's biggest maker of memory chips expected a first-quarter operating profit of 6.6 trillion won ($4.9 billion), up 931.3 per cent from a year earlier, Samsung Electronics said in a regulatory filing.

The operating profit was 20.5 percent higher than the average estimate, according to a survey by Yonhap Infomax, the financial data firm of Yonhap News Agency.

Sales increased 11.4 per cent to 71 trillion won for the January-March period. It marked the first time the company's quarterly revenue had topped the 70 trillion-won level since the fourth quarter of 2022. It did not provide its estimate for net income.

For 2023, Samsung Electronics posted 258.93 trillion won in sales, down 14.3 per cent from a year earlier.

Its annual operating profit dived 84.9 per cent on-year to 6.56 trillion won, and net profit tumbled 72.2 per cent to 15.48 trillion won.

Samsung did not release detailed performances of its key business divisions, but market watchers expect that its semiconductor unit, which oversees its cash cow chip business, will swing to a profit for the first time in five quarters.

In line with its strategic vision, Samsung Electronics has actively pursued the development of fifth-generation HBM chips, featuring 12 layers of DRAM chips with the industry's largest capacity of 36 gigabytes.

HBM chips, integral components used for AI computing, have garnered increasing attention across the world with the rise of applications such as generative AI, exemplified by models like ChatGPT.