Business
Nvidia supplier SK Hynix posts highest profit in 6 years on AI chip boom
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A man walks past a logo of SK Hynix at the lobby of the company’s Bundang office in Seongnam on January 29, 2021.
Jung Yeon-Je | AFP | Getty Images
SK Hynix, one of the world’s largest memory chipmakers, on Thursday said second-quarter profit hit its highest level in 6 years as it maintains its leadership in advanced memory chips critical for artificial intelligence computing.
Here are SK Hynix’s second-quarter results compared with LSEG SmartEstimate, which is weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:
- Revenue: 16.42 trillion Korean won (about $11.86 billion), vs. 16.4 trillion Korean won
- Operating profit: 5.47 trillion Korean won, vs. 5.4 trillion Korean won
Operating profit in the June quarter hit its highest level since the second quarter of 2018, rebounding from a loss of 2.88 trillion won in the same period a year ago.
Revenue from April to June increased 124.7% from 7.3 trillion won logged a year ago. This was the highest quarterly revenue ever in the firm’s history, according to LSEG data available since 2009.
SK Hynix on Thursday said that a continuous rise in overall prices of its memory products — thanks to strong demand for AI memory including high-bandwidth memory — led to a 32% increase in revenue compared with the previous quarter.
The South Korean giant supplies high-bandwidth memory chips catering to AI chipsets for companies like Nvidia.
Shares of SK Hynix fell as much as 7.09% Thursday morning.
“In the second half of this year, strong demand from AI servers are expected to continue as well as gradual recovery in conventional markets with the launch of AI-enabled PC and mobile devices,” the firm said in its earnings call on Thursday.
Capitalizing on the strong AI demand, SK Hynix plans to “continue its leadership in the HBM market by mass-producing 12-layer HBM3E products.”
The company would begin mass production of the 12-layer HBM3E this quarter after providing samples to major customers and expects to ship to customers by fourth quarter.
Tight supply
Memory leaders like SK Hynix have been aggressively expanding HBM capacity to meet the booming demand for AI processors.
HBM requires more wafer capacity than regular dynamic random access memory products – a type of computer memory used to store data – which SK Hynix said is also struggling with tight supply.
“Investment needs are also rising to meet demand of conventional DRAM as well as HBM which requires more wafer capacity than regular DRAM. Therefore, this year’s capex level is expected to be higher than what we expected in the beginning of the year,” said SK Hynix.
“While overcapacity is expected to increase next year due to the increased industrial investment, a significant portion of it will be utilized to ramp up production of HBM. So the tight supply situation for conventional DRAM is likely to continue.”
SK Kim of Daiwa Capital Markets in a June 12 note said they expect “tight HBM and memory supply to persist until 2025 on a bottleneck in HBM production.”
“Accordingly, we expect a favourable price environment to continue and SK Hynix to record robust earnings in 2024-25, benefitting from its competitiveness in HBM for AI graphics processing unit and high-density enterprise SSD (eSSD) for AI-servers, leading to a rerating of the stock,” Kim said.
High-bandwidth memory chip supplies have been stretched thanks to explosive AI adoption fueled by large language models such as ChatGPT.
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The AI boom is expected to keep supply of high-end memory chips tight this year, analysts have warned. SK Hynix and Micron in May said they are out of high-bandwidth memory chips for 2024, while the stock for 2025 is also nearly sold out.
Large language models require a lot of high-performance memory chips as such chips allow these models to remember details from past conversations and user preferences in order to generate humanlike responses.
SK Hynix has mostly led the high-bandwidth memory chip market, having been the sole supplier of HBM3 chips to Nvidia before rival Samsung reportedly cleared the tests for the use of its HBM3 chips in Nvidia processors for the Chinese market.
The firm said it expects to ship the next generation 12-layer HBM4 from the second half of 2025.
Business
Russia economy: Relying more China’s yuan is backfiring
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After the U.S. and its allies sanctioned Russia in 2022 for its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow turned away from the dollar and euro in international transactions and relied more on China’s yuan.
That coincided with more trade between the two countries as Russia was largely shut out of Western markets as well as the global financial system.
By June, the yuan accounted for 99.6% of the Russian foreign exchange market, according to Bloomberg, which cited data from Russia’s central bank. And Russian commercial banks ramped up corporate loans denominated in yuan.
But this dependence on the yuan is now backfiring as top Russian banks are running out of the Chinese currency, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“We cannot lend in yuan because we have nothing to cover our foreign currency positions with,” German Gref, CEO of top Russian lender Sberbank, said at an economic forum.
That’s because the U.S. expanded its definition of Russia’s military industry earlier this year, thereby widening the potential scope of Chinese firms that could get hit with secondary sanctions for doing business with Moscow.
As a result, Chinese banks have been reluctant to transfer yuan to Russian counterparts while servicing foreign trade payments, leaving transactions in limbo for months. With yuan liquidity drying up from China, Russian companies have tapped the central bank for yuan via currency swaps.
At the start of this month, banks raised a record 35 billion yuan from Russian’s central bank through these swaps, according to Reuters. And banks were expecting more help.
“I think the central bank can do something,” Andrei Kostin, CEO of second-largest bank VTB, said Thursday. “They hopefully understand the need to increase the liquidity offer through swaps.”
But on Friday, Russia’s central bank dashed those hopes, calling on banks to curb corporate loans denominated in yuan.
The Bank of Russia also said in a report that swaps are only meant for short-term stabilization of the domestic currency market and are not a long-term source of funding, according to Bloomberg. But rather than simply filling the roles that dollars and euros did, yuan loans have expanded.
“The increase in yuan lending was partly caused by the replacement of loans in ‘toxic’ currencies, but 41% of the increase was down to new currency loans,” the bank said.
The central bank also released a survey that showed a quarter of Russian exporters had trouble with foreign counterparts, including blocked or returned payments even when dealing in supposedly friendly countries. And about half of exporters said the problems got worse in the second quarter from the prior quarter.
The overall Russian economy has been propped up by the government’s wartime spending as well as oil exports to China and India. But the combination of busy factories and labor shortages due to military mobilizations have stoked more inflation.
Researchers led by Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld warned the seemingly robust GDP data mask deeper problems in the economy.
“Simply put, Putin’s administration has prioritized military production over all else in the economy, at substantial cost,” they wrote. “While the defense industry expands, Russian consumers are increasingly burdened with debt, potentially setting the stage for a looming crisis. The excessive focus on military spending is crowding out productive investments in other sectors of the economy, stifling long-term growth prospects and innovation.”
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Business
ETFs are set to hit record inflows, but this wild card could change it
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![ETF Edge, September 4, 2024](https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/108029268-1725475250ETF-FULL-090424.jpg?v=1725475249&w=750&h=422&vtcrop=y)
Exchange-traded fund inflows have already topped monthly records in 2024, and managers think inflows could see an impact from the money market fund boom before year-end.
“With that $6 trillion plus parked in money market funds, I do think that is really the biggest wild card for the remainder of the year,” Nate Geraci, president of The ETF Store, told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “Whether it be flows into REIT ETFs or just the broader ETF market, that’s going to be a real potential catalyst here to watch.”
Total assets in money market funds set a new high of $6.24 trillion this past week, according to the Investment Company Institute. Assets have hit peak levels this year as investors wait for a Federal Reserve rate cut.
“If that yield comes down, the return on money market funds should come down as well,” said State Street Global Advisors’ Matt Bartolini in the same interview. “So as rates fall, we should expect to see some of that capital that has been on the sidelines in cash when cash was sort of cool again, start to go back into the marketplace.”
Bartolini, the firm’s head of SPDR Americas Research, sees that money moving into stocks, other higher-yielding areas of the fixed income marketplace and parts of the ETF market.
“I think one of the areas that I think is probably going to pick up a little bit more is around gold ETFs,” Bartolini added. “They’ve had about 2.2 billion of inflows the last three months, really strong close last year. So I think the future is still bright for the overall industry.”
Meanwhile, Geraci expects large, megacap ETFs to benefit. He also thinks the transition could be promising for ETF inflow levels as they approach 2021 records of $909 billion.
“Assuming stocks don’t experience a massive pullback, I think investors will continue to allocate here, and ETF inflows can break that record,” he said.
Business
Tens of thousands in South Korea protest lack of climate progress By Reuters
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By Sebin Choi and Daewoung Kim
SEOUL (Reuters) – More than 30,000 protesters gathered in South Korea’s capital in broiling heat on Saturday, demanding more aggressive action by the government to combat global warming.
With temperatures exceeding 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), protesters young and old marched in the country’s biggest demonstration so far this year, snarling traffic in central Seoul.
They waved large banners reading “Climate justice,” “Protect our lives!” and “NO to climate villain (President) Yoon Suk Yeol’s administration”.
“Truth is, without the air conditioner this summer was not liveable and people could not live like people,” said Yu Si-yun, an environmental activist leading the protest.
“We are facing a problem not unique to a country or an individual. We need systemic change and we are running out of time to act.”
Organised by the 907 Climate Justice March Group Committee, the protest followed a ruling last month by South Korea’s top court that the nation’s climate change law fails to protect basic human rights and lacks targets to shield future generations.
The 200 plaintiffs, including young climate activists and even some infants, told the constitutional court that the government was violating citizens’ human rights by not doing enough on climate change.
South Korea, which aims to be carbon-neutral by 2050, is the biggest coal polluter after Australia among the Group of 20 big economies, with a slow adoption of renewable energy. The government last year lowered its 2030 targets for curbing industrial greenhouse-gas emissions but kept its national goal of cutting emissions by 40% from 2018 levels.
Even South Korea’s kimchi has fallen victim to climate change. Farmers and manufacturers say the quality and quantity of the napa cabbage used in the ubiquitous pickled dish is suffering due to intensifying heat.
“Feel how long this summer is,” said Kim Ki-chang, a 46-year-old novelist who was participating in the protest for a third straight year.
“This would be a much bigger threat and survival issue to younger generations than the older ones, so I think the older generation should do something more actively for the next generation.”
Seoul has had a record 20 consecutive nights defined as “tropical”, with low temperatures remaining above 25 C (77 F).
Protest organising committee member Kim Eun-jung said the demonstrators chose the popular Gangnam financial and shopping area this year, not the Gwanghwamun area they used last year, to have their voices heard by the many big corporations there that the group blames for carbon emissions.
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