On Wednesday, SK Hynix, one of the world's largest memory chip manufacturers, announced its third-quarter financial report. The financial report shows that due to the strong demand for HBM chips from its major customer NVIDIA, the company's quarterly revenue and profits surged year-on-year, setting a record high. The financial report shows that compared with analyst expectations based on LSEG SmartEstimates, SK Hynix’s third-quarter results were slightly lower than expected:
Revenue was 24.45 trillion won (approximately RMB 121.272 billion), a year-on-year increase of 39%, compared with analyst expectations of 24.73 trillion won
Operating profit was 11.38 trillion won (approximately RMB 56.445 billion), a year-on-year increase of 62%, and analysts expected 11.39 trillion won. This is also the first time that SK Hynix’s operating profit has exceeded 10 trillion won since its establishment.
SK hynix said in its financial report: "As customers continue to invest in artificial intelligence infrastructure, demand has increased significantly across the storage field. As a result, SK hynix once again exceeded the previous quarter's top performance level, driven by increased sales of high value-added products such as 12-layer HBM3E and server-oriented DDR5."
HBM4 will start shipping in Q4 this year
Thanks to its technological leadership in the HBM chip track, SK Hynix has become Nvidia's main HBM supplier and is now one of the biggest beneficiaries of this round of generative AI boom.
The company revealed that it has completed negotiations with major customers on the supply of HBM next year.
In terms of next-generation products, SK Hynix claims that its HBM4 has completed development and entered mass production in September, fully meeting customers' performance requirements and supporting industry-leading speeds. HBM4 will begin shipping in the fourth quarter of this year, with plans to fully expand sales next year.
Currently, SK Hynix still firmly occupies the leading position on the HBM chip track, but its main competitors—American Micron and South Korean technology giant Samsung—have been working hard to catch up.
According to a recent report published by Counterpoint Research, SK Hynix ranked first in the global HBM market in the second quarter of this year with 62% of shipments, followed by Micron Technology (21%) and Samsung Electronics (17%).
Demand for AI chips begins to spread
Kim Woohyun, chief financial officer of SK Hynix, also said that as the AI craze continues to spread, market demand has begun to spread to the broader chip field. He said:
"With the innovation of artificial intelligence technology, the memory market has shifted to a new model, and demand has begun to spread to all product areas. We will continue to respond to customer needs through market-leading products and differentiated technical capabilities, thereby consolidating our leading position in the field of artificial intelligence memory."
SK hynix talked about the strong demand brought about by the current AI boom in its financial report:
"Benefiting from the surge in demand for AI servers, shipments of large-capacity DDR5 above 128GB more than doubled from the previous quarter; in the NAND field, AI server enterprise-class solid-state drives (eSSD) have seen a premium, and their shipment proportion has increased."