The global memory industry has just reported the most extraordinary set of quarterly results in the history of semiconductors. Not because one company beat expectations, but because almost every participant in the DRAM and NAND business posted margins normally reserved for software.
Samsung Electronics reported third quarter operating profit of KRW 107.4 trillion, the first time any technology company has cleared KRW 100 trillion in a single quarter. Revenue reached KRW 195.3 trillion, up 127 per cent year on year.
The quarter, by company
Samsung’s device solutions division delivered KRW 147.1 trillion of revenue and KRW 106.5 trillion of operating profit, which means the chip business produced essentially all of the group’s profit for the period.
SK Hynix reported revenue of KRW 104.6 trillion, up 328 per cent, operating profit of KRW 83.3 trillion and an operating margin of 80 per cent. Micron’s fiscal fourth quarter revenue was USD 54.23 billion, up 379 per cent, at a gross margin of 87 per cent. Kioxia reported JPY 2.48 trillion of revenue for its second fiscal quarter, up 453 per cent, at a margin near 80 per cent, which is more than it earned in the whole of the previous fiscal year.
SanDisk reported USD 11.03 billion of revenue in its first fiscal quarter of 2027, up 378 per cent, with a gross margin of 85 per cent and an operating margin of 79.6 per cent. Western Digital, positioned differently in the same market, grew 55 per cent to USD 4.38 billion at a 58.1 per cent gross margin.
China’s contribution is no longer marginal. ChangXin Memory Technologies reported RMB 118.71 billion of revenue in the quarter, up 613 per cent, with RMB 54.44 billion of net profit attributable to shareholders and an 89.53 per cent gross margin.
Growth rate and margin are telling different stories
Read the two columns together and the ranking changes. SK Hynix grew revenue 328 per cent and still reached an 80 per cent margin. Western Digital grew 55 per cent and reached 58 per cent. The spread is not explained by volume.
It is explained by price per bit, and by which products sit on the steepest part of the price curve. Three lines are doing the work at SK Hynix: HBM4 shipping in volume, server DDR5 pricing rising sharply, and 321-layer enterprise solid state drives ramping. All three are the same underlying trade, which is that AI training and inference capacity is now constrained by memory bandwidth rather than by compute alone.
That single dependency explains the margin asymmetry. A commodity DRAM maker with older capacity gains from the cycle. A supplier qualified on HBM4 gains from a queue.
What a buyer should take from it
Two things follow for anyone procuring or investing in this chain.
The first is that the current pricing is not mainly a demand story. It is a qualification story. Very few suppliers can deliver HBM at AI accelerator volumes, and the buyers have already committed multi-year capacity. That gives pricing power which does not respond to normal inventory cycles.
The second is that China’s memory position has changed in kind, not just degree. A 613 per cent revenue increase with an 89.53 per cent gross margin at ChangXin indicates domestic capacity selling into a market where the alternative is imported and constrained. Whether that survives the next price correction is the open question, and the answer will depend on how much of that revenue is contracted rather than spot.
For now, the industry has produced a quarter that will be studied for a decade, and the companies reporting it have been careful not to promise a repeat.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original 36Kr report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://36kr.com/p/4058108507607944.