SK hynix's third-quarter operating profit this year was 83.3338 trillion won, up 632.1% from the same period a year earlier. Revenue was 104.6155 trillion won and net profit was 39.7756 trillion won, up 327.9% and 215.7%, respectively. The company announced an additional 60 trillion won in shareholder returns, raising its total shareholder returns this year to about 100 trillion won.
SK hynix disclosed its preliminary consolidated third-quarter results on the 28th, saying, "In a market environment where prices of major products rose on increased demand for artificial intelligence (AI) memory, both revenue and operating profit again posted record quarterly results on the strength of the competitiveness of high-value-added products." It added, "In particular, revenue topped 100 trillion won for the first time ever, and revenue and operating profit rose 32% and 38%, respectively, from the previous quarter."
DRAM led the growth. HBM4 shipments began in earnest, and sales volume of server DDR5 jumped sharply. In NAND, sales of 321-layer TLC eSSD increased, and high-value-added data center products overall maintained an upward trend.
The company also took a bright view of the AI market. SK hynix said, "As AI leads to productivity gains and new revenue creation in diverse areas such as software development, customer service and search, a virtuous cycle has taken hold in which rising AI usage leads to expanded infrastructure investment," and noted that "the players in AI investment are broadening from the early stage, when it depended on a handful of companies, to ordinary companies and nations." It then forecast that "the global AI data center infrastructure market will continue to grow steadily."
It projected that supply will not keep up with demand. The company said, "As the technological difficulty of leading-edge processes rises and building new production facilities takes a long time, a structure in which demand exceeds supply will persist through 2030."
Shareholder returns will increase substantially. In this filing, SK hynix put its expected shareholder returns for fiscal 2026 at about 100 trillion won. That figure includes the 40 trillion won share buyback and cancellation decided in August; excluding it, about 60 trillion won is newly committed. It plans to spend more than 30 trillion won on cash dividends and more than 60 trillion won on share buybacks and cancellations. The company said, "The 40 trillion won share buyback announced in August was completed last week, and the shares will be canceled soon."
The board meeting held that day approved a third-quarter cash dividend of 14 trillion won and the purchase of 20 trillion won worth of treasury shares. Of the treasury shares to be newly bought, 10 trillion won for shareholder returns will be canceled in full, and the remaining 10 trillion won or so will be used for employee compensation. The portion for employee compensation is excluded from the scale of shareholder returns.
The third-quarter dividend per share is 20,000 won. It consists of a performance-linked dividend of 10,000 won plus a special dividend of 10,000 won reflecting gains from its investment in Japanese semiconductor company Kioxia. The company plans to return most of the Kioxia investment gains to shareholders through the third-quarter dividend and the year-end dividend.
SK hynix stressed, "We will set the dividend size based on operating results, return additional amounts as special dividends if substantial investment gains arise, and continue share buybacks every quarter. Going forward, too, we will deliver stable results on the strength of solid memory demand growth and technological competitiveness, and share them steadily with shareholders."