BlockBeats News, August 8th. According to the Korea Economic Daily, SK Hynix is preparing a shareholder return plan totaling approximately 100 trillion Korean won (about $71 billion), including stock buybacks and cash dividends. The stock buyback is expected to be around 40 trillion Korean won (about $28.4 billion), representing slightly over 2% of the total issued shares, similar to the proportion of newly issued shares for the ADR listing on the US stock market, which was about 2.5%. This amount is about 7 times higher than last year's total return size of approximately 14.3 trillion Korean won, which included cash dividends (about 2.1 trillion Korean won) and stock cancellations (about 12.2 trillion Korean won).

The dominant position of SK Hynix in the AI infrastructure core storage HBM market is the fundamental support for SK Hynix to launch such a large-scale return plan. Hynix is expected to achieve revenue of about 345.6 trillion Korean won and an operating profit of about 266.4 trillion Korean won this year, representing year-on-year growth of about 256% and 464%, respectively. During the July earnings call, SK Hynix has already indicated that the shipment of HBM4 will ramp up in the second half of the year, and shipments of advanced process node general DRAM will also increase. Total shipments in the second half of the year are expected to exceed those in the first half. Previously, HSBC pointed out that SK Hynix's stock price implied an earnings cycle drop from about 6 years to 2.7 years, suggesting "excessive pessimism" in pricing. The accelerated implementation of this shareholder return plan may serve as a direct trigger for valuation repair.