SK Hynix posted record second-quarter revenue and operating profit, driven by sharply higher prices for DRAM and NAND memory, but its shares fell more than 15% intraday after results missed market expectations and the company said some high-value shipments had moved into the second half.
The South Korean memory maker reported revenue of 79.32 trillion won, up 51% from the prior quarter and 257% from a year earlier. Operating profit reached 60.54 trillion won, a 557% annual increase, while the operating margin climbed to 76% from 72% in the first quarter.
Those figures marked a major expansion in profitability, yet they fell short of consensus estimates of roughly 84 trillion won in revenue and 64 trillion won in operating profit. SK Hynix said deferred deliveries of premium products were the main reason for the gap, with the timing shift also changing the quarter’s product mix and average realized selling prices.
The market reaction shows how quickly expectations have risen around the memory supply chain, particularly for chips used in AI servers and high-performance computing. Record results alone were insufficient to offset concerns that delayed shipments could postpone revenue recognition from the company’s most valuable products.
Higher memory prices drove the quarter
SK Hynix said average DRAM selling prices rose about 30% quarter on quarter during the second quarter, while NAND flash prices increased about 50%, according to its earnings-call disclosures. Those gains helped lift revenue even as some higher-value products were pushed into later periods.
DRAM is used across servers, PCs, smartphones and data-center infrastructure, while NAND flash is used for storage products such as solid-state drives. The company’s figures point to an especially strong enterprise-storage market, where customers are building data-center capacity for AI workloads that require large amounts of fast, power-efficient storage.
Enterprise SSD revenue doubled from the first quarter, SK Hynix said. Solidigm, the company’s enterprise-storage subsidiary, recorded more than a twofold increase in revenue from SSDs with capacities of 30 terabytes or more.
Larger enterprise drives are increasingly relevant to AI infrastructure because training data, model checkpoints and inference workloads require storage systems that can handle substantial volumes without relying solely on conventional hard drives. The rise in high-capacity SSD sales gives SK Hynix another growth channel beyond its better-known high-bandwidth memory business.
HBM4 shipments begin as supply agreements expand
SK Hynix said HBM4 entered mass production and began shipping during the second quarter. High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, stacks multiple memory layers to provide far higher data-transfer capacity than conventional DRAM, making it a core component in advanced AI accelerators.
The company plans to expand HBM4 shipments in the second half and said it delivered HBM4E samples during the first half. The product roadmap places SK Hynix in a race with other major memory manufacturers to secure positions in the supply chains serving AI chip designers and cloud-computing groups.
SK Hynix also said it completed long-term agreement negotiations with about 10 customers. These deals are generally structured over five years and may include long-term purchasing commitments, deposits and customer-specific pricing arrangements.
Such contracts can give a memory producer greater visibility over demand and capacity planning, though the company said exact terms vary by product, customer and market conditions. They also reflect the pressure on major buyers to secure supplies of advanced memory, where qualification cycles and manufacturing capacity can make rapid supplier changes difficult.
For the third quarter, SK Hynix forecast DRAM bit shipments would increase about 10% from the second quarter. NAND bit shipments are expected to grow at a low single-digit rate.
Net profit included large investment gains
SK Hynix reported net profit of 93.92 trillion won for the quarter, though the figure included 62.2 trillion won in net non-operating gains. About 63.3 trillion won of those gains came from sales and valuation changes involving investment assets, according to the company.
That makes operating profit the clearer measure of the underlying performance of SK Hynix’s memory operations. At 60.54 trillion won, the operating result indicates that price increases and the sale of premium products were carrying much of the earnings expansion before investment-related gains were included.
The company also reported a stronger balance sheet. Cash and short-term investments reached 88 trillion won at the end of the second quarter, up 33.6 trillion won from the prior quarter. Interest-bearing debt fell to 18.6 trillion won, leaving net cash of 69.4 trillion won.
Expansion plans raise the stakes for supply execution
SK Hynix expects capital spending to reach 40 trillion won in 2026, up from 30.2 trillion won in 2025. The plan includes accelerating mass production at its M15X facility, preparing capacity for the first Yongin cleanroom scheduled to open in early 2027, and advancing the P&T7 packaging plant and M17 NAND project.
The spending programme follows a period in which advanced-memory demand has risen faster than the industry’s ability to add qualified production. Building new memory capacity requires years of construction, equipment installation and customer certification, especially for leading-edge products used in AI systems.
On the NAND side, SK Hynix said its 321-layer products had become the largest share of output. It plans to increase their share to about half of domestic NAND capacity by year-end. The company also began initial shipments of 1c-process DRAM, its sixth-generation 10-nanometer-class technology.
For cryptocurrency markets, the report offers a narrower signal than the sharp equity-market move might imply. Memory demand is closely tied to AI data centers and specialized computing infrastructure, but it does not directly measure demand for blockchain networks or digital assets. The more immediate connection lies with mining operators and data-center businesses that depend on semiconductor availability and equipment costs.
Rising prices for memory and storage components could increase expenses for companies deploying compute-heavy infrastructure, while SK Hynix’s planned capacity additions may eventually ease supply constraints. The second-quarter results instead show a market focused on timing: premium memory demand remains strong, but delayed shipments have made execution and delivery schedules as consequential as headline growth.
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