#SK海力士财报不佳盘后下跌 Below expectations, Hynix burns out—why is the most profitable quarter in history followed by a 47% stock plunge?

On Wednesday morning this week, South Korea’s storage giant SK hynix released its second-quarter earnings report. The report shows that the company’s quarterly profit hit a record high again, but failed to meet analysts’ expectations. After the earnings release, SK hynix’s ADR in the U.S. stock market was sharply down by nearly 9%.

1. Why “fell short of expectations”?
HBM share is too high, becoming a constraint instead: SK hynix’s business share in the high-end memory market for AI data centers is higher than that of its competitors. This means that when traditional memory chip prices are strongly rising, it benefits less.
Market expectations have been pushed to the limit: previously, the market forecast second-quarter operating profit of about 64 trillion won, which is already a history-level high base. Any small deviation will be amplified.
AI faith wavers: the entire storage sector has recently faced large-scale selloffs. SanDisk’s share price has already been “cut in half” since July, while Micron and SK hynix also fell sharply. Concerns about whether AI infrastructure’s massive capital expenditures can be monetized are spreading.

2. Positive signals worth watching
1. Long-term supply agreements (LTA): it has signed with about 10 customers and set up differentiated pricing mechanisms, aiming to smooth periodic fluctuations in storage prices. This will significantly increase the certainty of mid-to-long-term orders and demand.
2. HBM4 ramps up in the second half: HBM4 entered mass production and shipment in the second quarter, and will substantially expand capacity in the second half. The market generally expects that the ramp-up of NVIDIA’s next-generation AI accelerator platform will become an important catalyst.
3. Capital expenditure expansion: full-year 2026 capital expenditure is expected to be 40–50 trillion won. It is pushing forward mass production at the Cheongju M15X factory and a capacity expansion at the Yongin/Fan1 factory in early 2027.
4. Q3 guidance: expected third-quarter DRAM shipment volume to increase sequentially by about 10%, and NAND shipment volume to grow by low single digits

This article is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice! $SKHY ‌