SK Hynix's revenue in the first quarter of 2024 was 12.4296 trillion won, a record high for the same period

On April 25, SK Hynix released its financial report for the first quarter of fiscal year 2024 ending March 31, 2024. The company's combined revenue for the first quarter of fiscal year 2024 was 12.4296 trillion won, operating profit was 2.886 trillion won, and net profit was 1.917 trillion won. The operating profit margin for the first quarter of fiscal year 2024 was 23%, and the net profit margin was 15%.

The company's revenue in the first quarter of 2024 hit a record high for the same period, and its operating profit also hit the second highest level since the market was the best in 2018. The company regards this as a break from the long downturn and the beginning of a full recovery.

SK Hynix said: "Thanks to its leadership in AI-oriented memory technology such as HBM, the company increased sales of products for AI servers while continuing to implement profit-oriented management activities, achieving a 734% increase in operating profit from the previous month." The company also emphasized: "For NAND flash memory, as the sales proportion of high-end eSSD products increased and the average selling price (ASP) also increased, the company successfully turned losses into profits, which is of great significance to the company."

Looking ahead, the company believes that the demand for AI-oriented memory is growing, and the demand for general DRAM products will also recover from the second half of the year, so the semiconductor memory market will show a stable growth trend this year. The industry predicts that because high-end products such as HBM require greater production capacity than general DRAM products, as the output of high-end products increases, the supply of general DRAM products will decrease relatively, so the inventory of suppliers and clients will be exhausted.

In response to the growing demand for memory for AI, SK Hynix has decided to increase the supply of HBM3E products, which began production in March this year, and expand the customer base of its products. At the same time, the company will launch the fifth-generation 10nm-class (1b) 32Gb DDR5 DRAM products this year to strengthen its market leadership in high-capacity DRAM products for servers.

Regarding NAND flash memory, SK Hynix will promote product optimization to maintain the trend of performance improvement. The company will focus on increasing product sales with its highly competitive high-performance 16-channel eSSD products and its subsidiary Solidigm's quad-level cell (QLC) high-capacity eSSD products as the center. At the same time, the company will also respond to market demand with the best product line by launching the fifth-generation PCIe cSSD for AI PCs in a timely manner.

Note: NAND flash memory can be divided into single-level cells (SLC) that can store 1 bit of data per cell, multi-level cells (MLC) that store 2 bits of data, triple-level cells (TLC) that store 3 bits of data, and quadruple-level cells (QLC) that store 4 bits of data, based on the data storage method. Compared with SLC with the same number of cells, QLC can store up to 4 times the data, so it is easy to achieve high-capacity storage and has high production cost efficiency.

In addition, SK Hynix will invest in expanding production capacity in a timely manner. The company announced on the 24th of this month that it has decided to designate the M15X plant in Cheongju, South Korea as a DRAM production base and accelerate construction. It will also smoothly promote mid- and long-term investment projects such as the Yongin semiconductor cluster and the advanced packaging plant in Indiana, the United States.

Therefore, the scale of investment this year will be increased compared with the original plan at the beginning of the year. The company explained that the increase in investment was decided based on the growth trend of customer demand, and the supply of HBM and ordinary DRAM will also gradually increase according to market demand. The company expects that in this process, the global semiconductor memory market will grow steadily while the company can also ensure higher investment efficiency and financial stability.

SK Hynix’s CFO Kim Woo-hyun said, “Thanks to our leading edge in memory technologies such as HBM that are suitable for AI, our performance has started to recover across the board. In the future, we will continue to deliver the highest performance products in a timely manner and continue to focus on profit-oriented management to continuously improve our performance.”