That's a tough spin on positive news. Just because the analysts blew their estimates doesn't mean Samsung had a bad quarter. Here is the key quote:
"Sales of 47 trillion won ($41 billion) trailed the 49.8 trillion-won average of 35 analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg, overshadowing operating profit that rose to a record."
Consider the source: people reading Bloomberg probably do want to know what's going on with the share price moreso then a general or tech news source reader where the focus might remain on the raw numbers.
It's analysts jobs to know the competition and the holistic market, so perhaps their numbers were off somewhere else. You don't know what desperate measures competition might take in order to try to fend off or slow down someone you see who's going to become a strong competitor.
Well, if you are investing on analyst expectations, and then the stock doesnt meet those expectations, then of course a price correction is necessary. The market is efficient and so is sensitive to information changes.
Yes, but if the estimates were too conservative, then the adjustments should be upward, not downward. Adjusting unexpected profits upwards is clearly just a punishment.
Analyst estimates were bullish, Samsung's later estimates were less than that. Since its not in Samsung's interest to be less bullish than necessary, investors took that as new reliable information and reacted to it by adjusting their target price for the stock downwards. Nothing weird about it.
If Samsung was the only source of information, then you would be correctly. But they aren't, and even if they were, investors would make "bets" that were either more optimistic or pessimistic than what later information supported.
They are efficient with respect to imperfect information and an imperfect actor (humans with emotions), which means they will be even more volatile as new information is uncovered or new emotions arise.
Bloomberg headline writers love to try and assign causality to the meanderings of stock prices. Daniel Kahneman's recent book Thinking, Fast And Slow recounts a story from Nassim Taleb's book The Black Swan that encapsulates the tendency to find causality:
> A story in Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan illustrates this automatic search for causality. He reports that bond prices initially rose on the day of Saddam Hussein’s capture in his hiding place in Iraq. Investors were apparently seeking safer assets that morning, and the Bloomberg News service flashed this headline: U.S. TREASURIES RISE; HUSSEIN CAPTURE MAY NOT CURB TERRORISM. Half an hour later, bond prices fell back and the revised headline read: U.S. TREASURIES FALL; HUSSEIN CAPTURE BOOSTS ALLURE OF RISKY ASSETS. Obviously, Hussein’s capture was the major event of the day, and because of the way the automatic search for causes shapes our thinking, that event was destined to be the explanation of whatever happened in the market on that day. The two headlines look superficially like explanations of what happened in the market, but a statement that can explain two contradictory outcomes explains nothing at all. In fact, all the headlines do is satisfy our need for coherence: a large event is supposed to have consequences, and consequences need causes to explain them.
Actual announcement: "Samsung Electronics has said that it expects its profits to surge 79% in the second quarter as sales of its smartphones continue to grow."
"Samsung Shares Fall After Quarterly Sales Miss Estimates"