Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC released their 2012 first quarter guidance reports, and not surprisingly, the manufacturing companies have completely different financial results.

Samsung reported  consolidated sales of approximately 45 trillion Korean Won and a consolidated operating profit of approximately 5.8 trillion Won.  The South Korean company is expecting sales somewhere between KRW44 trillion ($39.0 billion) and KRW46 trillion for the three months which ended in March 31.  It is comparably higher than their Q1 2011 sales of KRW36.99 trillion.

The expected high operating profit can be attributed to the fact that their mobile devices are growing even more popular.  Just yesterday, it was reported that Samsung already sold 5 million units of the Galaxy Note phablet and it is expected that the number would just get higher.

Aside from the stellar mobile device sales, analysts suggest that, “a turnaround at Samsung’s liquid-crystal-display business after a year of losses and improving profits at its TV and home appliance unit have also helped to offset a relatively weaker performance from its memory chip business, which continued to suffer from falling prices.”

Samsung is the first major global technology firm to give earnings guidance for the first quarter, but the company did not elaborate much, stating that the guidance may differ from actual reports.

If Samsung’s guidance report seems positive and very promising, HTC’s report is grim in comparison.

HTC Corp. released their unaudited results for Q1 2012 and it looks brutal.  Total revenue declined by 34.92% from NT$104,157 in Q1 2011 to NT$67,790 million.  Unaudited operating income was at NT$5,099 million, net income before tax was NT$5,551 million, net income after tax was NT$4,464 million, and unaudited earnings per share after tax were NT$5.35 based on 834,256 thousand weighted average number of shares.

The reason for the huge decline is the strong competition from Apple and Samsung devices.  But analysts are still hopeful that the Taiwanese company would be able to recover since their new devices started shipping last month.

“Longer term, we believe HTC is a strong number 3 brand in smartphones,” Sanford Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu said.  “The scale of Samsung and the success of Apple continue to represent challenges to the company’s business model, but we believe HTC is in a strong position to recover from its low point.”