Seoul (South Korea), July 27: SK hynix Inc. said Wednesday it logged record quarterly sales and the best operating profits in four years in the second quarter, driven by the sales of NAND flash and positive currency effects.
The world's second-largest memory chip maker reported its second-quarter net income of 2.87 trillion won (US USD 2.2 billion), up 44.7 percent from a year earlier.
Operating income for the April-June period was 4.19 trillion won, up 55.6 percent from a year ago, the company said in a regulatory filing. Revenue rose 33.8 percent to an all-time high of 13.81 trillion won.
The earnings beat market expectations. The average estimate of net profit by analysts was 2.83 trillion won, according to the survey by Yonhap Infomax, the financial data firm of Yonhap News Agency.
"Although DRAM product prices fell during the second quarter, revenues increased as NAND prices rose and overall sales volume increased," the company said in a statement, adding that a strong dollar and the addition of Solidigm's sales contributed to the strong performance.
SK hynix set up its U.S. subsidiary Solidigm early this year following the completion of the first phase of Intel NAND and SSD business acquisition in December.
"It is meaningful to have achieved excellent business performance despite the difficult business environment, such as global inflation, prolonged conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, and COVID-19 lockdowns in certain regions of China," the company said.
While SK hynix cautioned that demand for semiconductors may dampen in the second half, especially for chips used in personal computers and smartphones, it expected chip demand for data centers would "grow steadily in the mid to long term."
In response to a challenging macroeconomic environment, SK hynix said it would carefully review next year's investment plan while monitoring product inventory levels in the second half of the year.
"Although the uncertainty of the business environment has increased recently, we are confident in the long-term growth potential of the memory industry," Noh Jong-wonh, president and chief marketing officer at SK hynix said. "We will focus on increasing fundamental business competitiveness while flexibly adapting to changes in the business environment."
Source: Yonhap