SK Hynix Posts Record Profit, but Misses Analyst Estimates despite 1,242% Growth

SK Hynix reported record second quarter results on July 29 and the stock fell 9.61% anyway, the clearest signal yet that expectations, not demand, are the binding constraint on memory stocks [doc26 doc12]. Revenue rose 257% year over year to 79.32 trillion won and operating profit jumped 557% to 60.54 trillion won, a 76% operating margin, while net profit rose 1,242% to 93.92 trillion won [doc25 doc26]. Those two growth figures describe different lines: the 1,242% net profit surge is inflated by a 63.3 trillion won gain on the sale of the company's Kioxia stake, so operating profit's roughly sixfold increase is the cleaner read on the underlying business .

Both headline lines still missed. Operating profit of 60.5 trillion won came in against roughly 64 trillion won expected, and revenue of 79.3 trillion won against about 84 trillion won . Analysts attributed the shortfall to HBM4 shipments landing below plan, which pushes revenue recognition into later periods, rather than to any softening in end demand . The absence of a concrete shareholder-return plan added to the disappointment .

The demand backdrop is in fact the opposite of soft, and that distinction is the whole story. SK Hynix's chief executive has said the memory shortage will be the industry's worst on record in 2027 and may persist beyond 2030, with data centers now absorbing roughly 70% of global memory output and consumer-grade DRAM and NAND in short supply as capacity is reallocated to high-bandwidth memory . The problem for the shares is not that demand is weakening; it is that a tight market was already priced in.

The print detonated across the sector. More than $1 trillion of market value came out of major chip names over the week, with SK Hynix down about $176 billion, Samsung about $173 billion and MU about $113 billion . NVDA, AMD and MU all fell alongside it on July 29 [doc21 doc11]. SK Hynix shares had already dropped roughly 15% the prior session in pre-earnings de-risking [doc28 doc8].

The read-through is that AI supply chain names are now being marked against consensus rather than against growth: a 557% increase in operating profit that misses by about 5% can still cost a stock 10% in a session. What to watch is HBM4 qualification and shipment timing across the memory makers, since the shortfall was a timing issue on the highest-margin product line, and whether sector multiple compression keeps traveling to NVDA on sympathy rather than on fundamentals.

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