SK hynix edges up 0.79% as Samsung and the wider market gain more

The session in numbers

SK hynix closed at 1,272,000 won (US$955.39) on the Korea Exchange (KRX) on Friday. That was up 0.79% from Thursday’s close of 1,262,000 won. Thursday’s close came after an 11.06% drop from Wednesday’s 1,419,000 won, as Pacific Tape reported at the time.

Samsung Electronics, the other large Korean memory maker, posted a bigger gain. Its shares ended at 215,500 won (US$161.86), up 2.62% from 210,000 won.

TIGER 200, an exchange-traded fund used here as a gauge of the wider Korean market, rose 2.05%. It finished at 89,060 won, compared with 87,275 won the day before.

The Bank of Korea’s ECOS database put the won at 1,331.4 per US dollar for the day.

SK hynix therefore ended higher, but it lagged both its main rival and the broad market.

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The day’s news

08:36 KST, survey of job seekers. Yonhap reported that SK hynix came first in a survey of the companies South Korean job seekers most want to join.

10:29 KST, AI memory showcase. SK hynix said it had shown its next-generation memory technologies for artificial intelligence (AI), Yonhap reported. The company described these as going beyond HBM, or high-bandwidth memory. HBM is stacked memory used alongside AI processors.

CXL demonstration. XCENA, a Korean fabless chip company, said it had demonstrated memory systems based on Compute Express Link (CXL) at the 2026 OCP Global Summit in San Jose, according to The Korea Times. A fabless company designs chips but does not make them itself. CXL is a standard for linking processors to memory. XCENA said the demonstration featured shared-memory technology developed in collaboration with SK hynix.

Analysts on recent share falls. Market watchers told The Korea Times that the recent sharp drop in Samsung Electronics and SK hynix shares had gone too far. In their view, the falls stemmed from thin demand from investors in the Korean market and weaker confidence, not from worsening earnings. The same analysts described the memory outlook as strong, The Korea Times reported. These are opinions from analysts, not company statements. SK hynix’s latest quarterly report, filed on Aug 14, put its consolidated operating profit for the second quarter of 2026 at 60.54 trillion won, up 60.97% from the first quarter and the highest in at least six quarters. Consolidated revenue for that quarter was 79.32 trillion won, up 256.78% from a year earlier.

Close of day

SK hynix finished Friday 0.79% higher at 1,272,000 won. It made less progress than Samsung Electronics and the TIGER 200 gauge. The company’s news was mostly about technology. It presented AI memory beyond HBM, and a partner showed CXL shared memory at an industry event in the United States. A survey also put SK hynix at the top of employers wanted by Korean job seekers.

What comes next

SK hynix is scheduled to hold a conference call on its third-quarter 2026 results on Oct 28 at 09:00 KST. Separately, under a decision filed on Aug 19, the company’s buyback of 24,070,000 common shares worth 40.0 trillion won runs until Nov 19; the stated purpose is to raise shareholder value by retiring the repurchased shares.

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Information only, not investment advice.