SK Hynix has reported an ‘earnings surprise’ for the first quarter of this year, with an operating profit in the mid-2 trillion won range, far exceeding market expectations. The company’s profitability has improved significantly, boosted by increased sales of high-value-added products such as AI-specific memory, HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), and high-capacity DDR5. Additionally, its previously sluggish NAND business has returned to profitability.
On Apr. 25, SK Hynix announced that it achieved revenue of $9 billion (12.5 trillion won) and an operating profit of $2 billion (2.9 trillion won) in the first quarter of this year. Year-on-year, sales surged by 144%, marking the company’s most substantial first quarter on record, while operating profit moved into positive territory. Operating profit soared by 734% compared to the previous quarter, surpassing market estimates by more than 1 trillion won ($1.8 trillion). This performance ranks as the second-best first-quarter result since 2018, the company’s most prosperous year. This remarkable turnaround follows a challenging year, culminating in a loss in the previous year’s fourth quarter.
“We have increased sales of products for AI servers, leveraging our leadership in AI memory technologies such as HBM,” said SK Hynix. “It is also significant that our NAND segment returned to profitability, benefiting from an expanded share of premium eSSD sales and an increase in the average selling price (ASP).”
SK Hynix expects steady growth in the memory market throughout the year. The demand for AI memory is expected to continue its upward trend, while general D-RAM demand is expected to recover in the second half of the year. Furthermore, the inventory of general-purpose D-RAMs in the market is likely to be depleted this year due to the shift in production toward premium products like HBM, which require greater production capacity than general-purpose D-RAM.
