On January 29, 2021, a man walked past the company’s logo in the lobby of SK hynix’s Bundang office in Seongnam.
Jung Yeon-je | AFP | Getty Images
SK Hynix, one of the world’s largest memory chip makers, said on Thursday that second-quarter profit hit its highest level in six years as it maintained its leadership in advanced memory chips critical to artificial intelligence computing.
Here’s how SK hynix’s second-quarter results compare to the LSEG SmartEstimate, which is weighted based on more consistent and accurate analyst forecasts:
- income: 16.42 trillion won (approximately US$11.86 billion), compared with 16.4 trillion won
- operating profit: 5.47 trillion won vs 5.4 trillion won
June quarter operating profit hit its highest level since the second quarter of 2018, rebounding from a 2.88 trillion won loss in the same period last year.
Revenue from April to June increased 124.7% from 7.3 trillion won a year ago. This is the highest quarterly revenue in the company’s history, according to LSEG data dating back to 2009.
SK hynix said on Thursday Due to the strong demand for artificial intelligence memory, including high-bandwidth memory, the overall price of its memory products continues to rise, resulting in a quarterly revenue increase of 32%.
The South Korean giant supplies companies such as Nvidia with high-bandwidth memory chips that meet the needs of artificial intelligence chipsets.
“We expect HBM and memory supply tightness to continue into 2025 as HBM production encounters bottlenecks,” Daiwa Capital Markets’ SK Kim said in a June 12 report.
“As such, we expect the favorable price environment to continue and SK hynix to benefit from its competitiveness in AI graphics processing unit HBM and AI server high-density enterprise SSD (eSSD) to record strong sales in 2024-25 earnings, thereby driving a re-rating of the stock,” King said.
As large language models such as ChatGPT drive the explosive adoption of artificial intelligence, the supply of high-bandwidth memory chips is already stretched thin.
Analysts warn that the boom in artificial intelligence is expected to strain the supply of high-end memory chips this year. SK Hynix and Micron said in May that they had sold out of their high-bandwidth memory chips for 2024 and that their 2025 inventories were almost sold out.
Large language models require large numbers of high-performance storage chips because these chips allow the models to remember details of past conversations and user preferences in order to produce human-like responses.
SK Hynix dominates the high-bandwidth memory chip market, becoming Nvidia’s sole supplier of HBM3 chips ahead of its competitors Samsung reportedly passed the test In recognition of the use of its HBM3 chips in Nvidia processors for the Chinese market.
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