According to TheFly, JPMorgan analyst Jay Kwon expects the buyback to boost shareholder returns over the next three months.
- Kwon expects SK Hynix to pursue additional shareholder-return measures over the next two years, building on the company’s latest treasury-share buyback and cancellation plan.
- According to a Bloomberg report, JPMorgan expects SK Hynix to follow up with $130 billion worth of shareholder returns over the next year.
- SK Hynix said Wednesday that its board approved a plan to repurchase and cancel 40 trillion won of shares over about three months starting August 20.
JPMorgan analyst Jay Kwon has recommended investors accumulate SK Hynix (SKHY) stock, saying the semiconductor maker’s share price sentiment is expected to improve gradually following its $28.7 billion buyback announcement.
According to TheFly, Kwon expects the buyback to boost shareholder returns over the next three months.
SK Hynix’s American Depositary Receipts (ADR) were up nearly 3% in Thursday’s pre-market trade.
SKHY Expected To Pursue Additional Shareholder Returns
Kwon expects SK Hynix to pursue additional shareholder-return measures over the next two years, building on the company’s latest treasury-share buyback and cancellation plan.
He views the planned capital return as a positive for the stock and expects it to support a gradual improvement in share price sentiment. “The worst is behind us,” Kwon said.
The firm maintained an ‘Overweight’ rating on SK Hynix, and per a Bloomberg report, it expects SK Hynix to follow up with $130 billion worth of shareholder returns over the next year.
SKHY’s Stock Buyback Program Details
SK Hynix announced on Wednesday that its board had approved a plan to repurchase and fully cancel 40 trillion won ($28.7 billion) of its own shares, with the program scheduled to begin August 20 and run for about three months.
Based on Tuesday’s closing share price of 1.662 million won on the Korea Exchange, the company expects to repurchase about 24.07 million shares, representing roughly 3.3% of its total shares outstanding.
SK Hynix said the move accelerates its existing shareholder-return program, which covers 2025-2027. It also plans to raise its shareholder-return target from within 50% of cumulative free cash flow (FCF) to over 50% of cumulative FCF during the program period.
SK Hynix said shareholder returns will combine share repurchases and cancellations with cash dividends. The company is also considering fixed and special dividends, with specific details on the scale and execution of additional returns expected after board approval at the time of its third-quarter earnings release.
SKHY Pushes Beyond HBM With Co-Packaged Optics
SK Hynix and researchers from the University of Virginia, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Nanyang Technological University, MIT and Yonsei University on Thursday published a roadmap for co-packaged optics (CPO) in Nature Electronics, outlining how optical interconnects could address data-movement bottlenecks as AI systems scale across thousands of GPUs and HBM stacks.
The paper said compute throughput has increased about threefold every two years, while interconnect bandwidth has advanced about 1.4-fold, creating a “bandwidth wall.”
CPO integrates optical transceivers closer to processors, reducing the distance high-speed electrical signals must travel and enabling optical links across chips, racks, and pods. The researchers identified targets including more than 100 terabits per second of bandwidth per node and energy consumption below 1 picojoule per bit.
“Even if computing chips become more powerful, overall system performance cannot improve unless data movement between chips keeps pace,” said University of Virginia Professor Kyusang Lee. “Replacing copper interconnects, which face inherent physical limitations, with optical links is the most promising path toward future scalability.”
What Retail Traders Think Of SKHY Stock
Retail sentiment on Stocktwits around SK Hynix trended in the ‘bearish’ territory at the time of writing.
SKHY ADR is down 8% year-to-date. The Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) is up 104% over the past 12 months, while the iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) is up 112%.
(Exchange Rate: 1 won = $0.00072)
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