Samsung just had its best quarter ever. The problem is it came at its phone business's expense.
Samsung is one of the world's largest memory chip manufacturers, supplying components to phone makers including itself. Right now those chips are in massive demand from AI companies, so Samsung sells them at record prices. That's great for Samsung's chip division. For Samsung's phone division, it means paying full market price for parts it used to get cheaply internally. The profit in one half of the company is a direct cost in the other. The phone business is heading toward its first ever annual loss despite selling more Galaxy S26s than ever.
Galaxy Glasses sidestep this entirely.
The component list for Galaxy Glasses is dominated by optics, camera sensors, and a Qualcomm chip designed specifically for glasses — not the high-bandwidth memory driving up smartphone costs. There's a 12MP camera, lightweight speakers, and transition lenses that darken in sunlight, all packed into a 50-gram frame priced at $379 to $499. That price point on a cheaper to build product means better returns per unit than a Galaxy phone sold in a brutally competitive market.
Meta sold seven million Ray-Ban glasses in 2025. Samsung is chasing Meta. It's also escaping its own cost structure.
Whatever Samsung's reasons, July is when the category gets its second serious competitor.