SK Hynix plans to launch a shareholder return program of approximately $71 billion, with stock buybacks reaching $28.4 billion.

TechFlow News, August 8, according to Korea Economic Daily, SK Hynix is preparing a shareholder return plan including stock buybacks and cash dividends, with a total scale expected to be around 100 trillion won (approximately 71 billion USD).

Of this total, the stock buyback scale is expected to reach 40 trillion won (approximately 28.4 billion USD), accounting for more than 2% of the company's total issued shares. This scale is close to the proportion of new shares previously issued by SK Hynix for the listing of American Depositary Receipts (ADR).

Compared to last year's shareholder return scale of about 14.3 trillion won (including about 2.1 trillion won in cash dividends and about 12.2 trillion won in stock cancellations), the scale of this plan has increased by about 7 times.

Behind SK Hynix's large-scale return plan is its leading position in the AI infrastructure core storage HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) market. The company expects this year's revenue to be about 345.6 trillion won, operating profit about 266.4 trillion won, representing a year-on-year growth of about 256% and 464% respectively.

Previously, SK Hynix stated at the earnings conference call that HBM4 shipments will officially ramp up in the second half of the year, while advanced process DRAM shipments will also increase, and overall shipment volume is expected to be higher than in the first half.

Market institutions believe that as AI computing power demand continues to grow, SK Hynix's improved profitability may drive the company's valuation repair. Previously, HSBC pointed out that the market's pricing of SK Hynix's earnings cycle was relatively pessimistic, and this shareholder return plan may become one of the important factors for valuation improvement.