SK hynix Tops 100 Trillion Won in Quarterly Revenue for the First Time

SK hynix took in 104.6 trillion won in the third quarter, the first time its quarterly sales have crossed 100 trillion won. Operating profit reached 83.3 trillion won, which the South Korean memory maker said gave it an operating margin of 80%.

The results, published on 28 October, came with three big messages. The company expects memory to stay in short supply through 2030. It has locked more than half of its 2027 and 2028 output into long-term contracts. And it plans to hand about 100 trillion won back to shareholders this year, while dropping its review of a stock market listing for its Solidigm unit.

What the filing shows

The figures appear in a preliminary disclosure on DART, Korea’s corporate filing system, and are based on Korean accounting standards. They have not yet been audited. Revenue rose 32% from the second quarter and more than quadrupled from a year earlier, when it was 24.4 trillion won. Operating profit rose 38% from the previous quarter and was more than seven times the 11.4 trillion won of a year ago.

Net profit tells a different story on paper. It was 39.8 trillion won, down 58% from 93.9 trillion won in the second quarter, because pre-tax profit fell from 122.7 trillion won to 50.7 trillion won. The release does not say what drove the swing. SK hynix ended September with 114.5 trillion won in cash and 15.8 trillion won of borrowings, giving net cash of 98.7 trillion won.

HBM4 takes over

SK hynix said server DDR5 sales grew strongly and that shipments of HBM4, its newest high-bandwidth memory for AI processors, “began in earnest” during the quarter. It expects HBM4 to overtake the older HBM3E in both volume and revenue in the fourth quarter. To get there, it will run its M15X fab at full capacity by the end of the year.

In NAND flash, the company plans to move more than half of its domestic output to its 321-layer process in the fourth quarter. Next year, with the first phase of its Yongin cluster in full operation, it expects investment to “increase significantly”, though it says it will adjust the scale and timing to demand.

Dividends, buybacks and the Solidigm U-turn

The board approved a third-quarter dividend of 20,000 won a share. Half of that is a special payout that shares the gains from SK hynix’s investment in Kioxia. According to the dividend filing, the total comes to 14.1 trillion won and will be paid on 30 November. The board also approved a further 20 trillion won share repurchase, with half to be cancelled and the rest used for employee pay.

Chief executive Kwak Noh-Jung said the Solidigm listing had been meant to fund the NAND unit’s expansion without straining SK hynix’s own budget. “We concluded that proceeding at this time would not be the best way to achieve the originally anticipated outcome. We have therefore discontinued our review,” he said. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Solidigm had tied a new US NAND plant to a licence for chip tools in China.

Why the long-term contracts matter more than the record

Record profits in a memory upcycle are nothing new. The industry has a long history of booms followed by gluts. What stands out this time is the contract book. SK hynix says it has long-term agreements with 14 major customers, including leading global cloud providers. Those agreements cover more than 50% of its capacity for 2027 and 2028. They are typically five years long, and prices move within a range agreed with each customer, so they follow the market without the full swings of spot pricing.

If that holds, it changes how investors should read the company. A memory maker with half its output sold years ahead at bounded prices looks less like a commodity cyclical and more like a supplier with fixed customers. That fits how AI buyers now treat HBM. Nvidia’s push to have its HBM base dies made at TSMC shows how deeply memory has become part of chip design. The company’s OCP showcase of pooled CXL memory points the same way. The risk is the one SK hynix names itself: it is betting that demand will keep outrunning supply until 2030, and planning investment on that basis.

China’s challenger is still behind

The main threat to that bet in China is CXMT. Its claim of a denser DRAM design sent SK hynix shares sharply lower earlier this month. On the same day as SK hynix’s results, Reuters reported, citing two unnamed people, that CXMT plans to start limited HBM3E production. According to those people, only about 20% to 30% of its chips are usable, compared with around 70% at SK hynix. CXMT did not respond to Reuters, and SK hynix did not immediately comment on the yield estimate.

Even if those figures prove right, they suggest a rival that is a generation or more behind in HBM, building because Chinese AI chipmakers cannot get enough memory under US export controls. Last week, people familiar with the plans said SK hynix and Samsung were upgrading their Chinese plants for denser NAND, which shows how tangled that supply picture remains. For now, the company that reported an 80% margin is the one selling HBM4 in volume.

Sources

1. SK hynix Newsroom: SK hynix Announces 3Q26 Financial Results (28 October 2026)
2. DART: SK hynix preliminary consolidated operating results, third quarter 2026 (28 October 2026)
3. DART: SK hynix cash dividend decision (28 October 2026)
4. Reuters via StreetInsider: China’s CXMT to start advanced AI memory production despite poor yields, sources say (28 October 2026)

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