By Joyce Lee and Hyunjoo Jin
SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea’s SK Hynix expects sales of its high-end semiconductors used in generative artificial intelligence chipsets to double this year after it reported a record quarterly profit that beat bigger rival Samsung ( KS: ).
Shares in SK Hynix, a key supplier of artificial intelligence chip giant Nvidia (NASDAQ: ), however, fell 4% on Thursday as the company warned of a steeper decline in prices for memory chips used in smartphones and computers due to slowing demand and growing competition from Chinese rivals.
Ahead of the results, SK Hynix shares jumped about 30% so far this year on upbeat sentiment fueled by business talks with Nvidia, outperforming Samsung, whose shares rose 2% over the same period.
“Demand for high-density server HBM and DRAM… will continue to increase as major global technology companies invest in AI servers and AI inference technology gains prominence,” SK Hynix said in a statement.
The world’s second-largest memory chipmaker posted an operating profit of 8.1 trillion won ($5.64 billion) in the October-December quarter, beating Samsung’s forecast fourth-quarter operating profit of 6.5 trillion won.
This is the first time SK Hynix’s quarterly operating profit has surpassed Samsung’s overall operating profit, analysts said, as its rival lags in supplying high-end HBM chips to Nvidia.
The company said its HBM chips accounted for 40% of total DRAM revenue in the fourth quarter. Overall, revenue for the quarter rose 75% year-over-year to 19.8 trillion won.
SK Hynix’s operating profit result was slightly above the average 8 trillion won forecast by LSEG SmartEstimate, which is weighted by analysts who are more consistently accurate, and up from 346 billion won a year earlier.
SK Hynix has increasingly outperformed rivals Samsung and US-based Micron Technology (NASDAQ: ) in recent quarters as it benefits the most from AI-driven appetite for high-end memory chips following its early entry and heavy investment in HBM chip development.
SK Hynix announced that it began shipping 12-layer HBM3E chips, the most advanced HBM model currently in mass production, to a customer in the fourth quarter. It is expected to start shipping even more advanced 16-layer HBM4 chips in the second half of 2026, and Chinese competitors will face difficulties in developing advanced chips due to US restrictions.
($1 = 1435.1200 Won)
