South Korea's SK hynix posted operating profit of 37.6 trillion won ($27.8 billion) for the first quarter, up 405% year on year and the highest quarterly profit in the company's history.
Quarterly revenue: 52.6 trillion won (+198%)
Net profit: 40.3 trillion won (+398%)
Operating margin: 72%
The Details
It is the fourth straight quarter of record results, and the first time any Korean chipmaker has cleared 50 trillion won in single-quarter sales.
The driver is high-bandwidth memory (HBM). SK hynix is Nvidia's primary HBM supplier, the stacked memory that sits inside every H100 and B200 GPU and will be inside the upcoming Vera Rubin systems. Big Tech buyers are taking everything SK hynix can produce.
DRAM contract prices: +83% in Q1.
NAND flash prices: +160% in Q1.
2026 capacity: fully sold out.
The numbers smashed analyst estimates. Yonhap Infomax had pegged consensus net profit at 31.95 trillion won. SK hynix beat that by more than 8 trillion won.
Operating margin nearly doubled in a single quarter, from 58% in Q4 2025 to 72%, on the same revenue base. That kind of margin expansion only happens when pricing is running well ahead of cost, and that is exactly what the AI memory cycle has delivered. The company has already started construction of a new memory plant in South Korea to meet 2026 to 2027 demand.
Why the print matters beyond Korea
SK hynix shares are up roughly 90% year to date. The market cap is now around $590 billion, which puts it ahead of ASML and within reach of TSMC's tier of equipment-and-supply leaders. Memory used to be the cyclical, commodity end of the chip industry. The AI cycle has flipped that.
For Samsung, the comparison is uncomfortable. Samsung is still the larger memory company by revenue, but it has been slower to qualify HBM3E with Nvidia, and its Q1 numbers will arrive next week against this benchmark. For Micron, the read is similar.
Some analysts now expect price increases to ease after Q2 as new capacity comes online. SK hynix says demand is strong enough that the favorable pricing environment continues. The 2026 order book is already booked.
Sources: Yonhap News, Korea Herald, Business Times Singapore, Reuters
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