SEOUL (Reuters) -South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc posted a 60% drop in third-quarter profit, missing estimates as red-hot inflation hurt demand for electronic devices and memory chips that go in them.
The world’s second-biggest memory chipmaker said on Wednesday its operating profit fell to 1.66 trillion won ($1.16 billion) in the July-September quarter, from 4.2 trillion won a year earlier.
Analysts expected a profit of 1.87 trillion won, according to Refinitiv SmartEstimate.
Revenue fell 7% on-year to 10.98 trillion won.
Prices of DRAM chips, used in devices and servers, fell around 20% in the third quarter from the second, SK Hynix said. Prices of NAND Flash chips that serve the data storage market, fell more than 20%.
The lacklustre results echo bigger rival Samsung Electronics’ third-quarter earnings slump and U.S. peer Micron Technology Inc’s warnings of a sharp decline in PCs and smartphones sales.
($1 = 1,426.6500 won)
(Reporting by Joyce Lee & Heekyong Yang; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
