Wednesday, January 29th, 2014
SEOUL, KOREA - SK Hynix Inc. has achieved record-high financial results only two years after being acquired by SK Group. Despite a setback last year following the Wuxi plant fire, the world's second-largest memory chip maker posted higher-than-expected sales revenue and operating profit for the year.
The company's 2013 operating profit ratio was 24 percent, overtaking that of Samsung Electronics' semiconductor division for the first time in seven years since 2006 when it recorded a 27-percent operating profit rate.
SK Hynix announced on January 28 that its sales revenue for the whole year of 2013 was 14,165 billion won, with operating profit and net profit rising to 3,379.7 billion won and 2,873 billion won, respectively. The sales revenue was 39.4 percent higher than that for the previous year, while the operating profit turning to the black from a deficit of 227.3 billion won in 2012.
An SK Hynix official commented, "We strengthened our business performance by continuous innovation and focus on high-profit items. Thanks to favorable market conditions, we could increase the sales of our mainstay products including DRAMs, NAND flash RAMs, and CMOS image sensors."
The company's financial stability has also improved markedly. The balance of cashable assets as of the end of 2013 was 2,786 billion won, rising by about 1 trillion won in one year. Its debt at the same time shrank by 1.9 trillion won to 4.5 trillion won. As a result, its gearing ratio and net gearing ratio have declined to 35 percent and 31 percent, respectively, from 66 percent and 48 percent.