Samsung Electronics continued its strong performance in the fourth quarter last year, the company said in its regulatory filing Friday.

Samsung Electronics estimated its Q4 operating profit at 9 trillion won ($8.2 billion), up 26.7 percent on-year. The company’s operating profit for the whole of last year is estimated at 35.9 trillion won accordingly, an increase of 29.4 percent from 27.7 trillion won in 2019.

Compared with a quarter earlier, when the firm delivered an earnings surprise of 12.3 trillion won, the Q4 profit was 27.13 percent less.

Revenue during the September-December period came in at 61 trillion won, up 1.87 percent from a year earlier. The company’s gross annual sales grew to 236.26 trillion won accordingly, up 2.54 percent from 2019.

Semiconductor sales appear to have led the gains, local industry sources and market analysts said. Samsung Electronics did not offer a detailed performance breakdown for the company’s business divisions.

Of the 9 trillion won operating profit, more than 4 trillion won should have come from the semiconductor business, while its mobile phone business is thought to have contributed about 2.3 trillion won. Profit from mobile phones appears to have dropped from the previous quarter due to the release of Apple’s iPhone 12 and sluggish sales of Samsung mobile devices.

The operating profit of Samsung’s consumer electronics business during the same period is estimated at 800 billion won, down from the third quarter when the company enjoyed a sales boom on pent-up demand amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The decrease was partly due to the company’s increased spending on year-end sales promotions, as well as the recent rise in display panel prices.

By Shim Woo-hyun(ws@heraldcorp.com)