SK Hynix memory, NAND revenues explode as prices rocket

Driven up by rocketing memory and NAND price rises, SK Hynix’s revenues for its first 2026 quarter exploded, with its profit exceeding the previous quarter’s entire revenue.

Record revenue of ₩52.6 trillion ($35.5 billion) won was 198 percent higher year-on-year, and exceeded Hynix’ full year 2023 revenue. There was a ₩37.6 trillion ($24.5 billion) operating profit and ₩40.35 trillion ($27.2 billion) net profit, up 398 percent Y/Y, a near 5x rise. Profit as a percentage of revenue was 76.7 percent.

We expected good numbers after Samsung’s recent results and were not disappointed, particularly as Hynix’s Q1 typically shows a seasonal downturn. The revenue product drivers were HBM, DRAM and enterprise SSDs. 

Its financial position is strong, with cash and cash equivalents at the end of the quarter ₩54.3 trillion ($36.7 billion), interest bearing debt of ₩19.3 trillion ($13 billion), meaning net cash of ₩35 trillion ($23.6 billion).

It sees AI inferencing’s rise causing sustained DRAM and NAND demand. Also, the spread of memory efficiency technologies will enhance the economic viability of AI services, and further drive memory demand. Demand for its HBM chips over the next three years is larger than its production capacity.

Prices rises for DRAM and NAND will probably continue this quarter but the rate of increase may slow after that.

Hynix will continue investing in HBM, fully ramp up the shipment of LPDDR6, saying it has completed development of the industry’s first 1cnm LPDDR6, with plans for full-scale market supply in the second half of the year, starting with adoption in a major smartphone customer’s next-generation flagship model 

Its192GB SOCAMM2, optimized for Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPU servers, began mass production this month.

It will address AI demand by expanding sales of CTF (Charge Trap Flash) based 321-layer QLC PQC21 client SSD drives, and its enterprise SSD lineup of high-performance TLC and high-capacity QLC drives.

It made the point that, in NAND, and “by leveraging synergies with Solidigm, which holds strengths in high-capacity QLC eSSDs, the company plans to strengthen its competitiveness in the AI data center and AI PC storage markets.”

Its building up its fab capacity to better meet demand, saying “this year's investment scale will increase significantly compared to the previous year, focusing on the ramp-up of M15X, infrastructure preparation on the Yongin cluster, and securing key equipment such as EUV.”

SK Hynix is set to have a further record-breaking quarters as world-wide enterprise adoption of AI means it can sell every chip it makes.