Is SK Hynix Stock a 270% Opportunity? Nomura Says Yes

Last Friday, Seoul-listed shares of SK Hynix Inc. (NASDAQ:SKHY) closed their worst week since November 2008, shedding nearly a fourth of their value. On Monday, Nomura stepped in and said: Enough is enough. The Japanese investment bank published a bullish note on the memory industry, eyeing triple-digit upside for the Korean giants. Nomura kept a Buy rating on SK Hynix with a 4.7 million won ($3,539) price target, 268% above Monday’s price. It also kept Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (KRX:005930) at Buy, with a 670,000 won ($505) target, or 207% upside. The selling has not stopped yet. On Tuesday, SK Hynix fell 4.2% to 1,223,000 won, or about $921, its lowest close since April. Samsung dropped 3% to 211,500 won ($159). Over the past month, the two stocks have lost 31% and 21%. So why would a bank double down on memory just as investors are running from it? SK hynix Inc. weekly price change since 2008. Source: TradingView Read Also: QUICK SPARK: South Korea’s KOSPI Logs Worst Week Since 2008’s Lehman Brothers Collapse Why SK Hynix Stock Has Been Under Pressure Three worries have hit memory stocks in recent weeks. China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies, known as CXMT, said on Oct. 10 that it had made progress on a denser DRAM design, the working memory used in servers. Neoclouds, the newer companies that rent out AI computing power, are facing funding stress. And revenue growth at AI labs has slowed. Nomura analysts led by CW Chung called the CXMT concerns excessive. In their view, “the market is underestimating both the breadth of AI demand” and the earnings it can generate. They see three distortions in the AI lab numbers. The first is accounting. OpenAI told investors its September annualized revenue run rate was about $50 billion, below the $68 billion to $70 billion cited earlier. According to Nomura, the gap mostly reflects how partner sales are counted. The second is customer churn. Anthropic’s limits on distillation, the practice of training one AI model on another’s answers, affected activity worth 5% to 7% of revenue, according to press reports. The third is the summer. Heavy users work less during holidays, and U.S. GitHub activity, Nomura’s proxy, fell 7.4% in the third quarter. The Fourth Quarter Is The Real Test For SK Hynix Growth remains fast. Based on Nomura’s estimates, OpenAI and Anthropic brought in $27.3 billion combined in the third quarter, up about 507% from a year earlier. The bar is still high. To hit the market’s $100 billion expectation for 2026, they’d need $43.9 billion in the fourth quarter, a 61% jump. If September’s pace simply holds, revenue would reach $29.7 billion. Meanwhile, the cash is piling up at chipmakers. Net cash at nine companies in Nomura’s sample, including Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron Technology Inc. (NASDAQ:MU), rose from $27 billion in early 2024 to $282 billion in the second quarter of 2026. Nomura projects about $2 trillion by the end of 2028, while data center operators sink deeper into debt. The bank said it would reassess its view if refinancing stress spread and led to widespread project cancellations. Read Also: Chip Stocks Repeated a Lehman-Era Losing Streak: Is The Bottom Now In? Chip Stocks Are Still Looking For A Floor The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index gained 1.6% on Monday, snapping an eight-day losing streak. “Selling streaks of this magnitude are rare,” said Adam Turnquist, chief cross-asset strategist at LPL Financial. Since 1994, the index has fallen seven straight sessions or more only 16 times. Three months later, it was higher 73% of the time. Turnquist added, “History suggests that this alone is not an all-clear signal.” The next checkpoint comes on Oct. 28, when SK hynix holds its third-quarter earnings call. Photo: Shutterstock