SK hynix booked more net profit than revenue in the quarter, and its shares fell 10 percent on the morning it said so

118 percent.

That is the net margin SK hynix printed in its own second-quarter release on Wednesday, and it is the reason the results are stranger than the word record makes them sound. Revenue was 79.3187 trillion won. Operating profit was 60.5426 trillion won, a margin of 76 percent. Net profit was 93.9226 trillion won, which is 14.6 trillion won more than the company took in.

The release does not explain the gap. It reports the three figures, the percentage changes against the first quarter and against a year earlier, and the balance sheet position, and it says nothing about the non-operating items that must sit between an operating profit of 60.5 trillion and a net profit of 93.9. The company also notes twice that the numbers are preliminary and that the review of the second-quarter accounts has not been finalised.

The comparisons the document does give

Revenue rose 51 percent from the first quarter, which reported 52.5763 trillion won, and 257 percent from the second quarter of 2025, which reported 22.232 trillion. Operating profit rose 61 percent and 557 percent on the same two comparisons, from 37.6103 trillion and 9.2129 trillion. Net profit rose 133 percent and 1,242 percent, from 40.3459 trillion and 6.9962 trillion. Cumulative revenue for the first half passed 100 trillion won for the first time in the company's history.

Cash and equivalents reached 88 trillion won at the end of June, up 33.6 trillion in three months. Total debt fell 0.7 trillion to 18.6 trillion, putting net cash at 69.4 trillion.

On the business itself the company said it has finalised long-term agreements with around 10 customers, that it began mass shipments of HBM4 during the quarter and will increase production in the second half, and that its 321-layer NAND products are now the largest share of total production, heading for roughly half of domestic capacity by the end of the year. It said it is accelerating mass production at M15X and expects to open the first phase of its Yongin cleanroom in early 2027.

What Seoul did with it

The shares fell.

SK hynix was down 10.32 percent by 11:20 a.m. in Seoul, Yonhap reported, in a session that opened 1.09 percent higher and then turned. The KOSPI was down 376.01 points, or 6.24 percent, at 5,647.65 at that point, after closing 10.84 percent lower on Tuesday. The Korea Exchange suspended program trading in KOSPI-listed shares for five minutes at around 10:55 a.m., a sell-side sidecar triggered when the KOSPI 200 futures index falls 5 percent or more for at least a minute. Samsung Electronics was down 5.45 percent.

Individual investors sold a net 1.37 trillion won of stock over that period while institutions bought a net 1.27 trillion and foreign investors a net 91.2 billion, Yonhap reported. Overnight the Dow Jones Industrial Average had risen 1.03 percent and the Nasdaq composite had slipped 0.22 percent. Yonhap attributed the selling to investors questioning whether spending on artificial intelligence will produce returns sufficient to justify technology valuations. The session was still running when this brief was written.