The world's largest memory chip and smartphone maker estimated October-December profit at $11.5 billion, which would be tech giant's highest fourth-quarter operating profit since Q4 2017.

The result was below what the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street expected due to an uptick in employees' bonuses, marketing costs for its mobile business, and ramp-up costs for new display panels being included in the quarter.

Revenue likely rose 23 per cent the company said in a short preliminary earnings release, in line with market expectations. Samsung is due to release detailed earnings on 27 January.

Although prices of memory chips dipped during the quarter, increased demand from server clients lifted Samsung's quarter-on-quarter shipments of both DRAM chips, widely used in data centres, and NAND flash memory chips, used for data storage in tech devices, analysts said.