SK hynix posts profit on rising demand for chips

Seoul: SK hynix said on Thursday it swung to a profit in the fourth quarter of last year on the back of rising demand for premium memory chip products.

The world's second-largest memory chipmaker posted an operating profit of 346 billion won ($259.4 million) for the October-December period, compared with a loss of 1.91 trillion won a year ago, the company said in a regulatory filing.

Its net loss came to 1.37 trillion won, narrowing from a deficit of 3.7 trillion won a year earlier. Sales rose 47.4 percent on-year to 11.3 trillion won, reports Yonhap news agency.

It is the first quarterly operating profit since the fourth quarter of 2022, when SK hynix marked the first quarterly operating loss since the third quarter of 2012.

"We recorded the first quarterly profit in a year following efforts to focus on profitability," SK hynix said in a statement, adding that increasing demand for AI server and mobile applications has helped improve the overall memory market conditions in the last quarter of 2023.

In particular, sales of its flagship products, including the AI memory HBM3 and high-capacity mobile DRAM, increased by more than four and five times, respectively, compared with a year earlier.

SK hynix is one of the key providers of HBM3 chips, the latest fourth-generation product of the high bandwidth memory (HBM), to the US tech company Nvidia Corp.