A view of SK hynix headquarters in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province. Yonhap News Agency [The Financial News] Forecasts now suggest that this year’s operating profits at Samsung Electronics and SK hynix will surge to second and fourth place, respectively, among global big tech companies. After Samsung Electronics set a new all-time record for a Korean company with 57.2 trillion won in operating profit in the first quarter, a series of analyses are projecting that SK hynix alone will earn more than 40 trillion won in operating profit in the same period.
Institutions Stunned by Samsung Electronics, Sharply Upgrading SK hynix OutlookOn the 14th, domestic and overseas market research institutions were found to be sharply raising their first-quarter and full-year earnings forecasts for SK hynix. Analysts say this is largely due to the "Samsung Electronics earnings surprise," in which the company’s results beat market expectations by nearly 20 trillion won. KB Securities now projects that SK hynix will post 40 trillion won in operating profit in the first quarter, followed by 60 trillion won in the second quarter, 70 trillion won in the third quarter, and 80 trillion won in the fourth quarter, maintaining a strong upward trajectory. On this basis, it forecasts full-year operating profit of about 251 trillion won, up 42% from its previous estimate. This level would place SK hynix fourth among global big tech firms, ahead of Microsoft (about 245 trillion won) and Alphabet (240 trillion won), with Samsung Electronics projected to rank second. For next year, KB Securities expects SK hynix’s operating profit to jump 55% to 358 trillion won, which would make it the world’s No. 3 earner after No. 1 Samsung Electronics (estimated at about 488 trillion won) and No. 2 Nvidia (465 trillion won). Global investment bank Macquarie Securities is even more bullish, presenting a forecast of 447 trillion won in annual operating profit for SK hynix next year.
For the first quarter alone, the dominant view is that SK hynix will post around 40 trillion won in operating profit. Forecasts include 40.4 trillion won from Yuanta Securities Korea, 40.3 trillion won from Kiwoom Securities, 40.1 trillion won from Heungkuk Securities, and 38.9 trillion won from Mirae Asset Securities. A semiconductor industry official stated, "We expect SK hynix to comfortably exceed the market consensus, which is about 35 trillion won based on the average forecast over the past month."
A visitor examines an actual SK hynix HBM4 high-bandwidth memory chip on display at the 27th Semiconductor Exhibition (SEDEX 2025), held at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center (COEX) in Gangnam District, Seoul, on the 22nd. News1 Memory Industry Shifts Toward a 'Made-to-Order' ModelThe biggest driver of these record earnings has been DRAM prices, which have soared nearly tenfold over the past year. The average fixed contract price for standard DRAM products, which stood at 1.35 dollars in January last year, reached 13 dollars by the end of March. The latest server DRAM, "DDR5 16Gb 4800/5600," now sells for about 37 dollars per chip. Typically, five to six chips weigh around 1 gram, putting the price at roughly 273,800 won per gram—making DRAM more expensive than gold, which was about 225,300 won per gram as of the 9th.
The market is focusing on two key aspects of the memory semiconductor sector. Not only is demand fundamentally strong, but the business model is also shifting toward a "made-to-order" structure similar to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)’s foundry business. Both Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are steadily converting their short-term, quarterly supply contracts into long-term agreements of three years or more. Kim Dong-won, Head of Research at KB Securities, noted, "With the push for long-term supply contracts, there is a high likelihood that the memory business will evolve into a foundry-like, made-to-order model with an order-in-advance, produce-later structure, similar to TSMC."
Assuming SK hynix achieves the upper-end forecast for next year’s operating profit—447 trillion won as projected by Macquarie Securities—the company’s performance bonus per employee would reach about 1.29 billion won. SK hynix, which has roughly 34,500 employees, agreed in labor-management talks last September to allocate 10% of operating profit to its performance-sharing (PS) pool and to abolish the previous cap that limited payouts to 1,000% of base salary. If the company were to earn about 200 trillion won in operating profit this year, the average performance bonus would be around 580 million won per person. SK hynix is scheduled to announce its first-quarter 2026 earnings on the 23rd.
ehcho@fnnews.com Cho Eun-hyo Reporter
