三星利润增19倍不及预期，卡塔尔LNG船遇袭推高欧洲气价

Just the morning. Good morning. What do you need to know this morning? Okay, first off, Samsung profits rise by 19 times. 19 times. That was great. But it wasn't great enough. A Katari LNG carrier has been hit in the Strait of Hormuz. And the NATO summit kicks off in Turkey today. It is a key moment for the European defence sector's recent rally. Anna absolutely will keep an eye on all of the developments at that NATO summit. Of course, guys sticking to what's happening in the Asia session then as a result of those numbers out of Samsung, yes, great, but not good enough. And that's what's taking the cost be down by 4.7%. The Samsung share price is weak. That weighs on the cost, be it weighs on Japanese companies that compete with them. Supply Samsung and rivals to Samsung. How will that play out for European stocks?

Well, watch the European futures picture that Katari, a tanker that was hit in the Straits of Hormuz. Well that is pushing up the gas price here in Europe this morning up by 5.2%. The oil price is a little firmer, broadly unmoved, but a little firmer. We will get some perspective on the developments in the Middle East. The countdown to the opening trade starts right now. Just the morning. Good morning. The chips are down and it's just been giving you the numbers, telling you what is happening in terms of the figures we're seeing on the screens. But the underlying story is really interesting here. Samsung just posted a 19 times profit increase. That is huge. The whisper number, though, particularly from the buy side, was bigger and as a result of which this looks like a disappointment. This morning. There has been a huge rally though recently in this space and as a result of which you have to do very, very well to keep up with that kind of exuberance. And this morning Samsung didn't. Yeah, absolutely. It did not. And as you point pointing out a 19 fold increase in quarterly profits. But that was price. It's amazing what the market has adjusted to pricing right now. And looking ahead, this is going to be interesting because it seems that analysts are looking at yes, shortages will persist in 2027. This is memory chips. But what's the mood in 2028. What's the demand picture. The pricing outlook in 2028. That seems to be where we have questions. And to be honest, we don't have many clues in the Samsung numbers so far on that subject. We might get a bit more at the end of the month when they give us more guidance. We also don't have a sort of sectoral breakdown yet. This was just the big picture from Samsung and the sectoral picture might tell us yes. Okay, so the memory side of the business doing well, but this is a company that also makes consumer facing products that then have to pay more for the memory chips and all the other things that we know are highly priced as a result of the AI built out. It's also hard to believe that from here they can push margins much higher. And yes, you're going to get maybe in the totality of the spend a bigger number. But the margins, do they get higher from here?

Is that something that we've kind of reached the limit of? Are we also reaching the limits of people's belief in the fact that we have not got more capacity still to come. The buildout story is going to be something that we worry about. So the margins are kind of here. But as we start spending more, the margins come down. Are we starting to see the cyclicality story beginning to emerge?

Yes. We've talked a lot about whether the Chinese are going to build out more capacity. Is that going to bring down those margins in anything that any, any kind of parabolic looking chart is going to attract others into the market, isn't it?

And it's also going to attract politicians into your market. And we've seen already pressure on this company to, uh, to provide bigger payouts to its staff. It's done that. And some of that is evident in the numbers that we're getting today. And we've also seen the political pressure to build out more capacity within South Korea. So spend more on CapEx. All of that very much in focus. Then let us talk about what's going on with the energy markets, because I mentioned you mentioned what was happening in the Middle East with the Qatar LNG tanker being hit. That is pushing up the gas price this morning here in Europe. It's pushing up the Brent price as well, 1.2% higher, 7286. But at the same time as we're talking about this, we've seen Axios reporting on other Iranian firings on vessels that cross. At the same time. We're talking about glass, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley talking about glass in the oil market. And the Saudis are reducing the price they're charging to Asian customers. And the only time they've done this in the past is when there's been a price war on. So we're getting some kind of conflicting signals, probably at different points of the curve, aren't they?

But different signals about where pricing is heading right now. It is really interesting. There's a glut at the front end of the curve, and you can see that in terms of just the shape, we basically we've come down at the front end. Then there's a spike higher as you get out a few months. Then it comes back down again. So the market is signaling a short term glut. How it's it's it's the duration of it. Clearly there is a lot of there are a lot of hydrocarbons coming out at the moment. The market is therefore expecting that it's going to be oversupplied. But how long does that last for is. It's interesting listening to Elizabeth Schnabel talking about this at the ECB. She sees she sees a situation which is different to what we saw before the war started. and we all got to see higher prices for energy. So yes, we get a short term glass, but over the medium term we're going to be paying more. And that theoretically year on it should be inflation. Absolutely. So we watch those different parts of the curve. We'll also watch who is buying oil and who is buying energy products broadly. Having a glass out with an opinion piece talking about China not having restarted buying. We've got a lot of strategic petroleum reserves to restock, of course, but also the Chinese went into the war that took place in the Middle East with large amounts of stock, and they haven't started rebuilding to replenish that. And Harvey Glass says that, you know, the price of Brent could swing between 60 and 80 based on what the Chinese do. You know, whether they decide they want to buy them when they decide that that is swing demand, not swing supply, which is which is an interesting kind of take on where we are right now. Um, let's talk about the NATO summit. Trump is going to dive a little bit later. We're anticipating he is going to talk about the fact that NATO needs to spend more. The Europeans need to spend more. European defense stocks have rallied recently. How critical is this summit and the messaging that comes from it?

To that rally, I think is going to be really interesting. If we do see a commitment, if we do see a strong commitment, does that rally extend from here?Because these stocks got very overvalued, then came down pretty sharply. And now maybe pricing a more realistic scenario. But what is that scenario. Maybe we'll find out over the next couple of days. Absolutely. Now we're going to see new orders announced at this NATO summit. We've seen the Canadians already talking about what they're doing around suppliers of submarines for their navy. So Canada picking the Germans to make those a genuine Norwegian, uh, tie up to make those marine systems. That's the preferred supplier. So we'll certainly watch that. This is Canada's largest ever military procurement. So this is the scale and the seriousness with which, uh, NATO is taking this, with which European and other non-U.S. members are taking this and taking the messaging that we're getting from Donald Trump on the need to step up and spend more. Germany, for example, 2027 budget that's now being discussed, being agreed by the