#夏日创作营 Next week, SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics, and Kioxia will release their latest financial reports, which may affect the next phase of semiconductor stock performance

Next week, three storage leaders—SK Hynix, Samsung, and Kioxia—are set to report their latest results. Amid market concerns about the sustainability of AI investment and the reliability of long-term storage contracts, these earnings reports will also serve as a “test of mettle” for whether the giants can maintain their profitability through this cycle.
Whether the three reports can prove that AI demand is still translating into orders for HBM, DRAM, and enterprise-grade solid-state drives will likely influence the next phase of semiconductor stock performance.

SK Hynix
SK Hynix will release its Q2 earnings report on Wednesday, July 29. Its CEO, Kwak Noh-Jung, expects that, to meet the fast-growing demand from AI, the tight supply situation for storage chips will continue beyond 2030. Thanks to higher average selling prices for DRAM and NAND flash, market expectations are that both businesses could achieve at least the fastest revenue growth rate since 2010.

Samsung
Samsung will officially release its full Q2 earnings report on Thursday, July 30. Rising DRAM and NAND flash prices, as well as increased HBM shipment volumes, are also expected to support Samsung’s Q2 performance. Analysts also expect that, as AI-related orders increase, capacity utilization in Samsung’s wafer foundry business will continue to improve, and stronger demand for HBM4 will further drive the company’s profit growth in the second half of the year. Previously, on July 7, Samsung had already published preliminary performance data. In Q2, revenue rose 129% year over year to 171 trillion won (about $116.6 billion); operating profit was 89.4 trillion won (about $58.4 billion), up 18 times year over year, setting the highest quarterly record in history. But even that impressive performance failed to lift the stock price. The day after the preliminary results were released, Samsung shares actually fell more than 7%. Analysts believe the market has already priced in strong earnings, and investors are effectively “buying the expectation and selling the fact.”

Kioxia
Kioxia will release its FY2027 first-quarter earnings report on Friday, July 31. The market expects its profit for the quarter to double compared with the previous quarter. As a leading Japanese flash memory player, Kioxia’s market value surpassed Toyota in mid-June, briefly making it the highest-valued company in Japan by market cap, but its stock price was cut in half over the following month.

How long can storage keep rising
From the three earnings reports above, what the market wants to verify is how long this current storage-chip upcycle can last, and whether the storage industry can truly break away from its cyclical nature.

Bullish investors believe AI-driven storage demand has structural rather than cyclical characteristics; as cloud providers continue to raise capital expenditures, storage chips are moving beyond the cycle.

Bears argue that cycles are cycles forever. One analyst said the pricing power created by today’s supply tightness may not be sustainable in the long run. Excessively high storage prices could also squeeze data center project returns, creating a “storage tax.” If there is overinvestment in AI computing infrastructure, both cloud providers’ capital expenditures and market sentiment could cool down. Another analyst noted that although global HBM wafer capacity will continue to increase, the added capacity will mainly be used to ease existing supply gaps. HBM capacity may remain tight at least through 2027, and oversupply before 2028 may not become a primary risk. Further widespread adoption of AI agents may also continue to expand demand for compute and HBM.

Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore has viewed the recent weakness in storage concept stocks as a “great buying opportunity.” In a report he published on July 20 local time, he said, “Through conversations with data center procurement managers, we confirm that the memory shortage has not eased at all,” and he predicted that “in Q3, memory prices will rise by at least 25% versus the previous quarter.” He added that, “although a correction in the memory industry in the short term is unavoidable, the current weakness in the stock price is actually a buying opportunity… memory shortages are very likely to last not only into 2027, but also into 2028.”

So it appears that next week, the market will focus on three points: how much cloud providers’ capex can be translated into actual storage orders, whether the price uptrend for HBM, DRAM, and NAND can continue, and whether leading manufacturers can maintain supply while expanding capacity.

Market analysts believe that if the three companies continue to deliver strong order and price guidance next week, semiconductor stocks may see a short-term adjustment with profit-taking, but the long-term outlook remains promising. However, if management signals that the pace of price increases is slowing, customer inventories are rising, or there is pressure from new capacity, market concerns about returns on AI investments could further spread from cloud providers to the chip-manufacturing end.