Revenue crossed ₩50T for the first time ever. Operating margin hit a record 72%. The engine: HBM memory for AI.
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✦ The bottom line
1Q26 revenue: ₩52.58 trillion (≈$35.55B) — the first quarter ever above ₩50T and a company record. Operating profit ₩37.61T (≈$25.43B) at a 72% operating margin. Revenue nearly tripled versus the same quarter a year earlier. The driver: surging demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in AI systems.
↓ the brief below
✦ Teach me
Money coming in (Korean won)
SK hynix is a Korean company and reports in Korean won (₩), not US dollars. Throughout this brief we lead with US dollars and put won in parentheses, using the exchange rate on the day results were released: 1 USD = 1,478.97 KRW (April 22, 2026).
SK hynix makes memory chips — the parts of a computer that hold data the processor is actively working with. Its main products are DRAM (fast working memory), NAND flash (storage), and HBM (high-bandwidth memory) — stacked DRAM glued directly next to an AI chip so data moves faster.
Wall Street calls this
Revenue / net sales (K-IFRS)
When a company's revenue suddenly *triples* year over year, the first question is *why* — and whether it can last. Here the answer is one word, *HBM,* and the rest of this brief is about how durable that is.
Total revenue · first quarter 2026
≈$35.55
B
₩52.58 trillion — the first quarter ever above ₩50T, and a company record. That's about triple the ₩17.64T from the same quarter a year earlier, as AI customers pulled in HBM and high-capacity server DRAM. Won converted at 1 USD = 1,478.97 KRW (Apr 22, 2026).
Tripling revenue is impressive on its own. But the more telling number is what's left over after costs. In a normal memory year, makers fight for thin margins on commodity chips. In this quarter, SK hynix kept 72 cents of operating profit on every dollar of sales — a level you almost never see in this industry. That gap between ordinary memory and AI memory is the whole story.
Operating margin · first quarter 2026
72
%
Operating profit ₩37.61T (≈$25.43B) on ₩52.58T of revenue — a record 72% operating margin. For perspective, that single quarter's operating profit was roughly 80% of the company's entire operating profit for all of 2025 (₩47.21T). Memory profits move in big swings, and this is the top of the swing.
One record quarter could be luck. The shape of the last several quarters tells you whether something has changed. Watch how fast the line bends upward — and remember that what bends up this steeply has, in past cycles, also bent back down.
Quarterly revenue · ₩ trillion (USD in caption)
₩17.6T
₩32.8T
₩52.6T
1Q25
4Q25
1Q26
Revenue went ₩17.6T → ₩32.8T → ₩52.6T over the last year (≈$11.9B → $22.2B → $35.6B). That's the AI-memory ramp in three data points. The same chart, read another way, is the cyclicality warning in Chapter 6.
Record revenue, record margin, demand it can't make fast enough. The growth is real — the open question, saved for later, is how long an up-cycle this steep can last.