NH Investment & Securities raised its target prices for Samsung Electronics and SK hynix to 5.3 million won and 32 million won, respectively. It said the spread of agent AI is driving memory demand to grow faster than expected, projecting that favorable industry conditions will persist for a long period.
Researcher Ryu Young-ho at NH Investment & Securities said in a report on the 8th that for Samsung Electronics, "through Computex, we confirmed that with the spread of agent AI, the market has entered a new phase different from the previous AI cycle."
Ryu said, "In the agent AI era, the importance of CPUs is growing further, and we also confirmed the potential for AI to spread to edge devices such as PCs and smartphones," adding, "the DRAM capacity required for AI inference servers is increasing significantly compared with general-purpose servers."
Ryu added, "As the price gap between general-purpose memory and high bandwidth memory (HBM) has widened recently, the justification for raising HBM prices in 2027 has also been secured," analyzing that "this is a factor that makes the 2027 earnings floor even more solid."
NH Investment & Securities forecasts Samsung Electronics' sales and operating profit for the second quarter of this year at 168.2 trillion won and 84.6 trillion won, respectively. It projects operating profit of 365 trillion won in 2026 and 506 trillion won in 2027.
Ryu said, "Samsung Electronics is currently trading at 5.9 times on a 12-month forward price-earnings ratio (PER) basis and 2.6 times on a price-to-book ratio (PBR) basis," adding, "it remains undervalued compared with Micron."
On SK hynix, Ryu said, "With the spread of agent AI and inference AI, demand is growing faster than semiconductor supply," explaining that "as computing architectures become multilayered, demand is expanding not only for HBM but also for server DRAM, SRAM, eSSD, and LPDDR (SoCAMM) and other various memories."
Ryu also said, "As general memory prices continue to rise, the likelihood of HBM price increases in 2027 is also growing," diagnosing that "the improvement trend in the memory market is appearing stronger than expected."
Accordingly, NH Investment & Securities raised its operating profit forecasts for SK hynix for 2026 and 2027 to 272.4 trillion won and 439.9 trillion won, respectively.