SK hynix says some customers brought forward orders ahead of U.S. tariffs

SK hynix said on Thursday that some customers had brought forward orders in preparation for new U.S. tariffs.

Speaking at the company's annual shareholder meeting, SK hynix Head of Global Sales and Marketing Lee Sang-rak, said the “pull-in” effects, along with the reduction in customers’ inventory, led to favorable market conditions recently.

But he added it remains to be seen whether the trend will continue.

In January, SK hynix had said its shipments of dynamic random access memory and NAND flash memory chips would decline by between 10 percent and 20 percent in the first quarter of this year from the previous quarter.

U.S. President Donald Trump said in February he intends to impose tariffs on imports of semiconductors and some other products “in the neighborhood of 25 percent”.

“Fears that the U.S. may impose semiconductor tariffs in April have led to pre-emptive transfers of semiconductor inventory to the United States,” Nomura said in a report this week.

“It is not yet known if the tariffs will actually be imposed; if this materializes, it could lead to higher prices for set products, which could dampen demand,” it added.

SK hynix, a key supplier to AI chip leader Nvidia, expects “explosive growth” in high bandwidth memory (HBM) demand this year backed by investments in data centers, CEO Kwak Noh-jung told shareholders.

In January, SK hynix forecast sales of its HBM chips would more than double this year.

While doubts around a slowdown in spending on AI hardware emerged in January following Chinese startup DeepSeek's claims that it had developed AI models rivaling Western counterparts at a fraction of cost, Nvidia last month signaled that its AI chip demand was intact.

Kwak saw DeepSeek's emergence as ultimately beneficial to SK hynix.

“This could likely have a positive impact on medium-to-long-term demand for AI memory chips. From our perspective, we don’t see DeepSeek slowing down demand for high-performance accelerators or HBM,” said Kwak.

Shares in SK hynix were down 2.1 percent in morning trading compared to the benchmark Kospi's 0.9 percent fall.

Reuters