Hyundai Motor Securities said on the 2nd that performance improvement at SK hynix will likely continue as High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) prices rise and sales volumes increase at the same time. It maintained its investment rating of "Buy" and raised its target price to 7.9 million won from 7.4 million won. The previous trading day's closing price of SK hynix was 651,000 won.
Noh Geun-chang, an analyst at Hyundai Motor Securities, said, "While there were observations that the recent surge in commodity memory semiconductor prices could temporarily reduce the strength of earnings surprises for SK hynix, which has a high HBM mix in its product composition (product mix), HBM3E, which uses DRAM dies (dies) as materials and supplies, will not be left out of the rising price trend."
He added, "SK hynix has a product lineup optimized for high-performance computing (HPC), including HBM3E·HBM4, 128GB server-grade high-reliability server memory (RDIMM) based on 32Gb mono dies, SOCAMM2, and TLC·QLC enterprise solid-state drives (SSD)," and said, "This product mix will further enhance earnings visibility."
Hyundai Motor Securities presented SK hynix's fourth-quarter 2025 revenue and operating profit at 33.7 trillion won and 16.8 trillion won, respectively, and projected this year's annual operating profit at 95.7 trillion won.
It also saw the broader industry trend supporting an increase in HBM shipments. Noh said, "The infrastructure investment race spreading around AI data centers (AIDC) is spurring replacement demand not only for computing servers but also for storage servers," adding, "In particular, Microsoft and Google, which are expanding their AI agent services, are aggressively increasing storage server investments, and the two companies' server demand is expected to rise more than 30% from a year earlier."
It also cited increased sales driven by key customer Nvidia as a positive factor. He said, "North American cloud service providers (CSPs), which had been somewhat conservative about adopting Nvidia's finished goods AI racks, are expected to actively purchase ultra-large AI racks such as GB300 NVL72 and VR200 NVL144 this year," and forecast, "With NVL series penetration expanding, centered on Microsoft and Meta, demand for HBM4 and SOCAMM2 will rise together."
He added, "SK hynix is expected to mass-produce HBM4 at the M15X plant, which begins operations this year, and supply it to Nvidia, and the resulting earnings improvement effects will begin in earnest."