IN PLAY: Samsung Releases its First Quarter Profit Forecast

Samsung Electronics, South Korea’s mobile phone and electronics giant, just released its first quarter profit forecast and they were not too bad as they came in better than anticipated. That is the good news and now here is the reality, they saw a sharp decline from the numbers released one year ago. The reality is, their smartphone division was battered hard over the last year and will take time to recover.

Let us look at the numbers just released. The South Korean tech giant and rival to Apple Inc. (AAPL: Nasdaq) forecasted the they would have a profit of $5.43 billion or 5.9 trillion won for the first quarter of this year. They beat the consensus forecasted among financial analysts and economists, which is a profit at 5.3 trillion won. However, this is sharply lower from what we saw last year at 8.5 trillion won.

The Asian tech giant also lowered its revenue forecast. Samsung is forecasting a revenue of 47 trillion won for the first quarter (January through March). This is below the expectations of 49.8 trillion won and way below last year’s 53.7 trillion won. This is now the sixth quarter in a row of declining revenues for the embattled electronics’ giant as they are finding more smartphone competition that is stiffer than ever before.

We are expecting that Samsung will release its official first quarter revenue and profit results on time at the end of April. After this news was released, shares of Samsung were a bit unchanged up a marginal 0.7 percent. Expect the stock to be in play the rest of the day.