Samsung Heavy's 2011 4Q results lower than expected

Hanwha Investment & Securities, a Korean securities company, announced that Samsung Heavy Industries (Samsung) 2011 4Q results will stay at disappointing levels.

The company predicts Samsung's revenue, operating profit, and operating profit rate will record KRW 3.4513 trillion, KRW 214 billion, and 6.2%, respectively, for the last three months of 2011. Revenue increased slightly by 1.2%, but operating profit dropped by 8% compared with the same period late year. Initially, market analysts estimated that Samsung's revenue and operating profit would come in at KRW 3.4741 trillion and KRW 218.3 billion.

Hanwha Investment & Securities analyst Mr. Jeong said, "Although the working days increased, but the reflection of orders of less value to sales result has increased since 2010, so the outlook growth was pretty weak compared to 3Q 2011."

Meanwhile, Samsung set a new goal to obtain more orders in 2012 of about USD 12.5 billion. The details of goal are as follows: 2 billion for 10 LNG carriers, 1 billion for 10 container ships, and 5 billion for 8~10 drill ships.

Samsung signed an LOA contract with INPEX, an Australian oil & gas exploration and production company, for a CPF (Central Processing Facility) building with the contract scale around USD 23 billion. So the success of goal depends on the arrangement of drill ship and container ship orders.  < 김보람 기자 brkim@ksg.co.kr >