SK hynix Sets New Quarterly and Annual Records Driven by HBM

Operating Profit Surpasses 47 Trillion Won, Operating Margin Hits 58%
Record Broken After 7 Years Amid Soaring AI Semiconductor Demand
Accelerating Establishment of Production Bases in Yongin, Cheongju, and the United States

SK Hynix has set new records for both quarterly and annual performance, driven by a surge in demand for artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductors.

On January 28, SK Hynix announced that its operating profit for the fourth quarter of last year reached 19.1696 trillion won, a 137.2% increase compared to the same period the previous year. Revenue for the same period was 32.8267 trillion won, up 66.1%. Both revenue and operating profit marked all-time highs for a single quarter.

The increase in operating margin, a key profitability indicator, was also notable. The operating margin for the fourth quarter reached 58%, surpassing the previous record of 57% set in the third quarter of 2018, during the semiconductor boom, and setting a new all-time high after seven years. This is attributed to the sharp increase in sales of high value-added products such as high bandwidth memory (HBM).

Annual performance also showed steep growth. Last year’s cumulative revenue increased by 46.8% year-on-year to 97.1467 trillion won, while operating profit soared by 101.2% to 47.2063 trillion won.

The main drivers of this performance growth were the expanded sales of high value-added products such as HBM and enterprise solid-state drives (SSD). In the DRAM sector, HBM revenue more than doubled year-on-year, contributing significantly to the results. For standard DRAM, SK Hynix began mass production of sixth-generation (1c nm) DDR5 using 10nm-class technology, and demonstrated its leadership in server modules by developing the industry’s largest-capacity 256GB DDR5 RDIMM based on fifth-generation (1b nm) 32Gb chips. In the NAND sector, the company achieved record annual revenue by responding to enterprise SSD demand from the second half of the year.

SK Hynix stated, “This is the result of a strategic response that simultaneously secured profitability and growth by strengthening technological competitiveness and increasing the proportion of high value-added products to meet the demand structure being reorganized around AI. It was another year in which we demonstrated our world-class technological competitiveness.”

SK Hynix also plans to continue securing domestic and overseas production bases to respond to mid- to long-term demand. The company aims to maximize production capacity at the new M15X fab in Cheongju, Chungbuk as soon as possible, is constructing the first fab in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, and is working to establish the P&T7 fab in Cheongju and an advanced packaging plant in Indiana, USA, to further strengthen its global integrated manufacturing capabilities.