SK Hynix Analysts Push Back on CXMT Fears as Earnings Test Nears
Published on 10/17/2026 at 08:20 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Seoul — A bruising week for SK Hynix shareholders is meeting an unusually unified Wall Street rebuttal, with two major brokerages arguing that the market has mispriced the threat from China and overlooked a tightening squeeze in advanced memory supply.
The stock closed Friday at 1,272,000.00 KRW, a modest 0.8% gain on the day but still 24% lower over seven sessions and 57% below its 52-week high. Despite that drawdown, the shares remain up 96% year-to-date — a reminder of how forcefully the AI boom has repriced the chipmaker.
What Set Off the Selling
The turbulence traces to comments from CXMT President Cao Kanyu at a conference in Shanghai. ChangXin Memory Technologies said it had made progress on a novel 4F² DRAM cell architecture and is targeting a DDR5-RDIMM server module by year-end. Investors read the disclosure as a coming wave of price competition in standard DRAM, and the stock briefly lost more than 10% in Seoul on Tuesday.
Citi isn't buying the panic. The bank reckons CXMT's architecture is unlikely to reach mass production before 2028, and notes the Chinese firm still trails the world's leading DRAM makers by four generations. On that reading, fears of an imminent glut in high-performance memory are overdone.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying SK Hynix?
Sentiment was further muddied by broader industry debate over how AI megaprojects will be financed, and by Elon Musk's pointed criticism of memory makers' pricing — remarks that added fuel to an already nervous tape.
The Bull Case Reasserts Itself
Meritz Securities moved first, lifting its price target on SK Hynix to 3.2 million Won on Monday while reiterating a buy. Analyst Kim Sun-woo projects third-quarter 2026 operating profit of 80.1 trillion Won — a 32% jump from the prior quarter and ahead of consensus.
Goldman Sachs followed a day later, calling the pullback an attractive entry point on a risk-reward basis. The firm's argument: market participants are overestimating how quickly Chinese manufacturers can close the technology gap with the industry leaders. South Korean media reports struck a similar note, pointing to persistently tight capacity for high-performance memory as underpinning the earnings outlook.
SK Securities' Han Dong-hee weighed in as well, saying profit forecasts for next year are being revised upward on worsening memory shortages and rising HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) prices.
A Product Roadmap Beyond HBM
The company is not standing still on the technology front. At the OCP Global Summit, SK Hynix showcased its MARS architecture alongside a second-generation 256-gigabyte CXL-3.2 memory module for data centers. The module delivers more than double the bandwidth and roughly 30% better energy efficiency than its predecessor, according to the company — a signal that SK Hynix intends to defend its lead against newcomers.
The Numbers That Matter
Hard data arrives within days. A mandatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission puts SK Hynix's third-quarter balance sheet at October 28, with the official analyst and investor call set for 9:00 a.m. Seoul time. Financial circles had also floated October 27 as a possible date. Either way, investors will soon learn whether operating reality can validate the bullish forecasts — or whether the skeptics had it right.
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