Mirae Asset Securities on the 18th raised its earnings estimates for SK hynix to reflect strong NAND prices. It kept its investment rating at "buy (BUY)" and lifted its target price to 3.2 million won from 2.7 million won. SK hynix closed the previous trading day at 1,819,000 won.
Mirae Asset Securities projected SK hynix's operating profit for the second quarter of this year at 6.74 trillion won. It added that it could expand to 29 trillion won in 2027 and 42 trillion won in 2028.
The key to profitability improvement is a rise in the NAND average selling price (ASP). NAND is the core memory semiconductor used in SSDs. As artificial intelligence (AI) servers increase, demand for SSDs to store data grows in tandem.
Kim Young-geon, a researcher at Mirae Asset Securities, said, "The NAND ASP growth rate is expected to be 45% in the second quarter of this year, 23.2% in 2027, and 27% in 2028," and noted, "The high bandwidth memory (HBM) ASP growth rate is also expected to be around 25.3%."
Kim assessed that big tech companies' purchases of SSDs are inevitable. Kim explained, "As the number of NAND layers exceeds 232, there are concerns it may hit limits for high-performance AI applications," and added, "While this is likely to be overcome through measures such as CBA, the immediate surge in AI demand makes it unavoidable to respond by increasing the sheer number of SSDs."
Market research firm TrendForce also projected that the enterprise SSD market will grow rapidly. In particular, it analyzed that there is a trend in which the number of SSDs installed per server is increasing more than the capacity per SSD.
NAND prices are also expected to continue rising. Kim said, "Japanese memory company Kioxia expects NAND prices to rise more than 40% in the second quarter of this year," and explained, "With demand likely to exceed supply through 2027, NAND OPM could reach the 70% range."