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korea's two biggest tech companies releasedtheir earnings guidance for last year's fourth quarter. while samsung electronics celebrates a betterthan expected result,... lg saw a three-month period in the red. kim min-ji breaks down the contrasting digitsfor us. it's the best report card in more than twoyears for korean tech giant samsung electronics. the company is estimated to have posted anoperating profit of nine-point-two trillion won,... or roughly seven-point-eight billionu.s. dollars, in the fourth quarter of last year.

that's up almost 50 percent from the sameperiod in 2015. sales came to about 45 billion dollars,...down zero-point-six percent on-year. the forecast on operating profit beats a marketconsensus by almost a billion dollars... and is the first time to top the nine trillionwon mark since the third quarter of 2013. it's also a significant turnaround from thefour-point-three billion dollars it posted in the third quarter -- which reflected lossesfrom the ill-fated galaxy note 7 smartphone. "this time it's mostly semiconductor play. more than half the profits is coming fromthe semiconductor division. but that's also propelled by the smartphonemarket.

you can see the feature sets in smartphonesis getting richer and more improved. so the required memory content has to increase,so that's boosting the memory division. but samsung's mobile division isn't enjoyingthe extra boost they used to have in the q4 because they don't have the note 7." for local rival lg electronics, however, itwasn't such a rosy picture -- with its operating income turning to the red. the company is estimated to have posted anoperating loss of almost 30 million dollars in the fourth quarter of last year. that compares with a profit of 292 milliondollars for the same period in 2015.

sales are expected to come in at 12-point-3billion -- up one-and-a-half percent from a year ago. "it seems lg's smartphone division appearsto have posted a greater loss in the fourth quarter,... as its flagship model wasn't thebest seller. on top of that, it has been streamlining itsmobile business,... and the costs from that will likely be reflected in the fourth quarter." on top of that, rising panel prices and seasonalfactors, are expected to have also hurt profits of lg's traditional cash cows -- like itshome appliances and home entertainment sectors. the two companies will release their finalearnings reports -- with a breakdown of performance

by unit -- later this month. kim min-ji, arirang news.