Global headwinds to pose a significant challenge for Samsung in Q2 2025

Samsung may have just pulled through in Q1 2025 by posting better quarterly results than analysts had expected, but it's not entirely out of the woods just yet. The fundamental issues that plague its business are still there and are set to be compounded by the global headwinds.

Tariffs imposed by the Trump administration remain a major source of headache for the company. Despite the 90-day pause announced yesterday, there's still significant uncertainty, and that's never good in situations where long-term decisions need to be made.

The US has hit imports Vietnam with 46% tariffs. Vietnam is where Samsung phones are made for the most part. So even though the pause brings a reprieve, a baseline 10% tariff is still in place, meaning that Samsung would have to pay 10% more than it did previously to import devices made in Vietnam for sale in the United States.

India was originally hit with a 26% tariff rate so the other option for Samsung would have been to shift production of devices meant for the US to that country. It depends how the tariff negotiations play out, or if there's no suitable outcome, the company may find itself having to either raise prices for customers to reduce its margin.

The tariffs are also expected to reduce demand for memory products across the entire industry, even as analysts expected the market to rebound in Q2 2025. This would hurt Samsung as it already grapples with a lack of orders from NVIDIA for its HBM3E modules and intense competition from Chinese memory makers in the DRAM and NAND flash markets.

There's a lot that Samsung needs to go its way for it to emerge unscathed in Q2 2025, and the worst of it is being inflicted not entirely due to the company's own actions.