SEOUL, July 29 (Reuters) – South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix reported a more than sixfold increase in quarterly operating profit to a record high on Wednesday, \u200cdriven by robust demand for advanced memory chips as big technology firms \u200cramped up spending on AI data centres. <\/p>\n
The Nvidia supplier reported an operating profit of 60.5 trillion won ($41.62 billion) \u200bfor the April-June period, compared with 9.2 trillion won a year earlier. But it missed a 64 trillion won forecast by LSEG SmartEstimate, which is weighted toward analysts who are more consistently accurate. <\/p>\n
“Driven by sustained demand growth from expanding AI infrastructure investments, high-performance products for AI \u200cservers led price increases, enabling \u2060the company to surpass its previous record set in the prior quarter,” SK Hynix said in a statement. <\/p>\n
SK Hynix missed analysts’ forecasts because \u2060its higher exposure to high-end memory chips used in AI data centres than rivals meant it benefited less from a stronger price rally in conventional memory chips. <\/p>\n
Contract prices for certain dynamic \u200brandom \u200baccess memory (DRAM) chips jumped about 52% in the \u200bsecond quarter from the previous quarter, \u200cwhile prices for some NAND products doubled, according to data from market tracker TrendForce. <\/p>\n
Concerns about the ability of “hyperscalers” like Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Oracle to fund hundreds of billions of dollars of planned investment in AI infrastructure have weighed on chip shares globally in recent weeks. <\/p>\n
SK Hynix’s net profit rose more than 13-fold, driven in part by \u200cnon-operating gains. It reported net non-operating profit of \u200b60.9 trillion won, including gains related to investment assets, \u200bwithout providing further details. <\/p>\n
Kim Sunwoo, \u200ba senior analyst at Meritz Securities, estimated that the company recognized cumulative \u200cinvestment gains following the completion last month \u200bof the sale \u200bof its stake in Japanese NAND flash memory maker Kioxia. <\/p>\n
SK Hynix invested about 4 trillion won in Kioxia in 2018 through a Bain Capital-led consortium of U.S., \u200bJapanese and South Korean investors, \u200cparticipating via two special purpose vehicles (SPCs). <\/p>\n
The company said its quarterly revenue rose \u200b257% to 79.3 trillion won. <\/p>\n
($1 = 1,453.7200 won) <\/p>\n
(Reporting by Heekyong Yang and Joyce Lee; \u200bEditing by Jamie Freed and Sonali Paul) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEOUL, July 29 (Reuters) – South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix reported a more than sixfold increase in quarterly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,6821,61685,4547,28059,61622,13757],"class_list":["post-122111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-data-centres","tag-investment-gains","tag-memory-chips","tag-operating-profit","tag-robust-demand","tag-sk-hynix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}