SK Hynix has broken its all-time record for six consecutive quarters since the second quarter of last year, posting an operating profit exceeding 83 trillion won in the third quarter of this year.

Amid a continuing upward trend in memory prices and the full-scale reflection of sales from HBM4, the sixth-generation High Bandwidth Memory, forecasts suggest that the strong earnings run will be prolonged as memory supply shortages are expected to continue until 2030.

Amid robust performance, the company has decided to implement shareholder returns totaling nearly 100 trillion won this year, sharing an additional 60 trillion won with shareholders, which includes the majority of investment gains from Japanese semiconductor firm Kioxia.

SK Hynix announced in a regulatory filing today (the 28th) that its preliminary consolidated operating profit for the third quarter of this year was 83.3338 trillion won, up 632.1% from the same period last year.

Revenue rose 327.9% year-on-year to 104.6155 trillion won.

This marks the first time that quarterly revenue has surpassed 100 trillion won.

Net income increased by 215.7% to 39.7756 trillion won.

The operating margin stood at 79.7%.

This operating profit exceeded the market consensus of 76.2605 trillion won compiled by Yonhap Infomax by 9.3%.

Consequently, SK Hynix recorded more revenue in this single quarter than its entire annual revenue for last year (97.1467 trillion won), surpassing 100 trillion won in quarterly revenue for the first time since its founding.

Furthermore, both revenue and operating profit have broken record highs for six consecutive quarters starting from the second quarter of last year.

By product category, the full-scale shipment of HBM4 alongside a sharp surge in sales of server-side DDR5 drove the growth of DRAM performance.

In NAND, sales of 321-layer eSSDs (enterprise SSDs) expanded, maintaining growth across high-value-added products targeted at data centers.


Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the third quarter stood at 114.5 trillion won, an increase of 26.5 trillion won from the end of the previous quarter, while borrowings decreased by 2.8 trillion won to 15.8 trillion won.

As a result, net cash expanded to 98.7 trillion won.

In particular, SK Hynix forecasted that memory supply shortages will persist until 2030.

The analysis indicates that artificial intelligence (AI) investment subjects are moving past the initial stage of relying on a small number of companies to expand to general enterprises and the national level, and in the memory market, demand will be driven in the short term by enterprise and personal AI and in the medium to long term by physical AI.

Conversely, supply faces increased technological difficulty and prolonged periods for constructing new production facilities.

Accordingly, SK Hynix plans to accelerate the expansion of production capacity and the enhancement of product competitiveness based on current favorable conditions to maintain its current growth trajectory.

Today, SK Hynix also announced an additional shareholder return package valued at 60 trillion won.

This brings total shareholder returns for the year to 100 trillion won, following the recently completed share buyback worth 40 trillion won.

Out of the 100 trillion won, cash dividends will account for 30 trillion won or more, while the acquisition and cancellation of treasury shares will amount to 60 trillion won or more.

The cash dividend for the third quarter is 14 trillion won, and the share buyback amount is 20 trillion won.

Among the treasury shares to be acquired, 10 trillion won intended for shareholder return will be entirely cancelled, while the remaining approximately 10 trillion won will be used for employee compensation.

The third-quarter dividend is 20,000 won per share, consisting of a regular dividend of 10,000 won reflecting improved performance and a special dividend of 10,000 won distributing gains from the sale of Kioxia shares.

SK Hynix explained that in the case of Kioxia, the majority of investment returns will be returned to shareholders.

SK Hynix stated, "Amid a market environment where prices of major products rose due to increased demand for AI memory, we once again recorded all-time record quarterly figures for both revenue and operating profit based on our competitiveness in high-value-added products," adding, "Moving forward, we will continue to generate stable performance based on solid memory demand growth and technological competitiveness, and consistently share this with our shareholders."

(Photo: Yonhap News)