Because price of D-RAM for PCs greatly fell than expected, it had bad effects on SK Hynix’s performance in second quarter. It is planning on its growth by increasing importance of D-RAM for servers and mobiles as well as next-generation DDR4 and LPDDR4 that have their demands increase.
SK Hynix (CEO Park Sung Wook) announced on the 23rd that it made sales of 3.96 billion dollars (4.639 trillion KRW) and business profit of 1.17 billion dollars (1.375 trillion KRW) in last second quarter. Although sales and business profit increased 18% and 27% respectively compared to last year, it fell to -4% and -13% compared to first quarter of 2015.
Reason why performance is lower compared to last quarter’s performance is because drop of price of D-RAM for PCs is greater than expected and demand decreased as well. As the price of D-RAM for PCs fell, some servers and consumer markets that use those products were affected as percentage of their shipments increased 4% but their total average sales price (ASP) of D-RAM fell 8%.

Mobiles and D-RAM played huge rolls in increasing D-RAM’s shipment. NAND-Flash maintained previous quarter’s price standard as its shipment increased 8% compared to previous quarter, but its ASP fell 6%. Due to increase in seasonal demand in China and expansion in demand for mass storage, multi-chip package (MCP) that is laminated with NAND and mobile D-RAM secured 14% of total sales and recorded highest quarterly sale.
SK Hynix is predicting that demand for PCs will recover in end of 2015. But it is estimating that effect of Intel’s Skylake and MS’s Window 10’s releases won’t be big enough to recover all of PC demands.
Third quarter will focus on expanding next-generation DDR4, LPDDR4 for mobiles, and 32 GB mass-storage D-RAM modules for servers. It is expected that steady increase in demand will happen as D-RAM modules for servers have bigger storages and mobile D-RAM for medium to low-priced phones centered on LPDDR4 as demand for choosing increases.
Shipment of D-RAM will increase 10% in third quarter, and it is planning to increase percentage of D-RAM from 30% up to 40%. On the other hand, it is seeing that percentage of D-RAM for PCs will decrease to 20%. Percentage of DDR3 production will be decreased as well.
It is predicting however that shipment of NAND-Flash will increase to middle of 10% as demand for embedded multi-chip package (eMCP) increases and it is becoming more important to install mass-storage NAND on to mobiles such as Smartphones.