Key points
- SK Hynix (SKHY) reports its April to June results on Wednesday, July 29. Most analysts expect operating profit of 64.09 trillion won ($43.9B USD).
- The lowest forecast, from Korea Investment & Securities, is 60.4 trillion won ($41.4B USD), about 8% below everyone else.
- Even that lowest number is more than the 47.2 trillion won ($32.3B USD) SK Hynix made in all of 2025.
- Some in the market are talking about 70 trillion won ($48B USD), which would mean about 82 won of profit on every 100 won of sales.
Update, July 28, 2026 (Wednesday morning in Seoul): SK Hynix reported. Operating profit was 60.5426 trillion won ($41.6 billion USD) on revenue of 79.3187 trillion won ($54.6 billion USD), below the 64.09 trillion won consensus described below and just above Korea Investment & Securities' low estimate of 60.4 trillion won. Two corrections to what this piece said. First half operating profit came to 98.1529 trillion won ($67.5 billion USD), so the company did not clear 100 trillion won for the half as stated below, though first half revenue did cross that mark at 131.895 trillion won ($90.7 billion USD). The operating margin landed at 76%, so the entire miss was revenue rather than profitability.
SK Hynix reports its results for April through June on Wednesday, July 29. Everyone who follows the company agrees it will be the best three months it has ever had. They don't agree on how good.
The forecasts run from 60.4 trillion won up to 70 trillion won of operating profit, which is what a company makes selling its products before it pays interest and taxes. That's a difference of about 16 percent between the lowest guess and the highest.
Most analysts land at 64.09 trillion won ($43.9B USD) on sales of 84.06 trillion won ($57.6B USD). In the first three months of this year, SK Hynix made 37.6103 trillion won ($25.8B USD) on sales of 52.5763 trillion won ($36B USD).
One number puts all of that in perspective. In the whole of 2025, SK Hynix made 47.2 trillion won ($32.3B USD). The average forecast says it made about 17 trillion won ($11.7B USD) more than that in three months.
One firm expects less than everyone else
Korea Investment & Securities is the odd one out. In a report dated July 13, analyst Chae Min-suk put the figure at 60.4 trillion won ($41.4B USD) on sales of 80.9 trillion won ($55.4B USD), about 8 percent below what everyone else was saying at the time.
The reason comes down to what SK Hynix sells. More of its business is high bandwidth memory, the expensive kind that goes into AI systems, than its competitors' businesses are. "HBM sales concentration versus competitors resulted in ASP growth trailing market averages," Chae wrote. ASP means average selling price. The point is that so much of what SK Hynix sells is already the costly product, so its prices did not climb as fast as everyone else's did.
Chae estimated that the price of ordinary DRAM memory rose about 30 percent from the first three months of the year. NAND memory, the kind used for storage, rose about 50 percent.
Korea Investment lowered what it expects the company to make this year by 9 percent, and next year by 11 percent. It still tells clients to buy the shares, and still expects them to reach 3.8 million won ($2,604 USD).
Even so, Chae's lower number would be a company record. It works out to 74.6 won of profit on every 100 won of sales.
| April to June operating profit | Won | USD | Profit per 100 won of sales |
|---|---|---|---|
| Korea Investment & Securities | 60.4 trillion | $41.4B | 74.6 won |
| What most analysts expect | 64.09 trillion | $43.9B | 75 won and up |
| Talked about in the market | 70 trillion | $48B | About 82 won |
| All of 2025, for comparison | 47.2 trillion | $32.3B |
Add the first three months to any of these and SK Hynix clears 100 trillion won ($68.5B USD) for the half year.
Why the numbers got this big
AI data centers need memory, and they have been buying it faster than it gets made. Prices for ordinary memory chips went up. So did prices for the storage drives data centers buy.
Kim Dong-won, research director at KB Securities, said the shortage feeds itself. "HBM production expansion will substantially constrain general memory supply capacity," Kim said. Building more of the expensive AI memory uses up factory space that would otherwise make the ordinary kind, so the ordinary kind runs short too.
Kim expects big technology companies and AI data centers to grow to about 70 percent of everything SK Hynix sells.
What actually matters on Wednesday
Not the profit number. A record is already expected.
What nobody knows is how long this lasts. Memory used to be sold a few months at a time, at whatever the price happened to be. Now the biggest customers sign contracts running three to five years.
"As memory shifts toward multi year contracts, valuation depends on earnings sustainability duration, not quarterly metrics," Chae wrote. Put plainly, what the company is worth now rests on how many years it can keep making money like this, not on any single three month stretch.
That's the question Wednesday has to answer. Our fuller look at the quarter is here, and the company's Seoul shares have been at the center of the Kospi's record year of trading halts.
Sources
- Seoul Economic Daily (Korean language), 한투證 "SK하닉 2Q 영업익, 시장 전망치 하회할 것", July 13, 2026
- inews24 (Korean language), SK하이닉스, 2분기 영업익 64조원 전망…이익률 75% 넘을 수도, July 26, 2026
- JB News (Korean language), SK하이닉스, 29일 2분기 실적발표… 영업이익률 80% 넘나
Won converted at 1,459.42 to the dollar, the rate on Sunday, July 26, 2026. Nothing here is investment advice.
