SK hynix Posts Record Q3 as HBM4 Ships, Pledges 100T Won Payout
3 min readSK hynix has reported the biggest quarter in its history. Revenue for the third quarter of 2026 reached 104.6 trillion won, the first time the Korean memory maker has crossed the 100 trillion won mark, and operating profit hit 83.3 trillion won for an 80% operating margin. The SK hynix Q3 earnings, presented on the company’s call on October 27, came with a shareholder return plan of roughly 100 trillion won.
Six record quarters in a row
SK hynix is the leading supplier of high-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM chips that sit beside Nvidia and other AI accelerators. As AI data center spending surged through 2025 and 2026, memory prices and volumes followed. Revenue was up 32% from the prior quarter and 328% from a year earlier, while operating profit rose 632% year over year.
CEO Kwak Noh-Jung told analysts the company has “delivered record results for six consecutive quarters,” according to a BigGo Finance summary of the call.
What drove the SK hynix Q3 earnings
DRAM bit shipments grew about 10% from the second quarter, with server DDR5 shipments up more than 40%, and DRAM average selling prices climbed by a high-twenties percentage. NAND prices rose by a mid-twenties percentage as the company prioritized 321-layer enterprise SSDs.
The bigger shift is HBM4. CFO Kim Woo-hyun said full-scale mass production and shipments began in the third quarter, and the company expects HBM4 to overtake HBM3E in both volume and revenue in the fourth quarter. Long-term agreements with 14 key customers now cover more than half of 2027 and 2028 capacity, and SK hynix describes its DRAM and HBM volumes as effectively sold out through 2029.
Net income was 39.8 trillion won after a 32.6 trillion won hit from foreign exchange and investment valuation losses. Cash climbed to 114.5 trillion won against just 15.8 trillion won of debt.
A 100 trillion won return to shareholders
The company plans to return about 100 trillion won through fiscal 2026: at least 30 trillion won in cash dividends and at least 60 trillion won in buybacks and cancellations, 40 trillion of which it completed last week. The Q3 dividend is 20,000 won per share, half of it a special dividend funded by gains on its Kioxia stake. SK hynix also dropped its review of a Solidigm IPO. Kim said the share price “is undervalued” relative to earnings and cash flow.
Why it matters
These numbers show where the money in the AI boom is landing: not only in the chips that compute, but in the memory that feeds them. SK hynix expects DRAM demand to grow by a mid-twenties percentage in 2027 and plans a significant capex increase centered on its Yongin fab, though Kim cautioned that “more fabs does not necessarily mean more supply.” Watch for Samsung’s and Micron’s responses, and for whether HBM4 pricing holds as output ramps.