韩国内存出口追踪：三星2025年第三季度HBM收入存在上行风险，SK海力士存在下行风险

Korea Memory Export Tracker: Upside to Samsung's 3Q25 HBM, &Downside to SK hynix's We find Korea export data is a good leading indicator of HBM revenue from Korean suppliers.With that & the availability of the September data, we find an upside risk to Samsung’s 3Q25HBM revenue but a downside risk to SK hynix’s. Mark Li+852 2123 2645mark.li@bernsteinsg.com Edward Hou, CFA+852 2123 2623edward.hou@bernsteinsg.com An upside risk to Samsung’s 3Q25 HBM revenue & a downside risk to SK hynix’s. With R2at 0.97, “multichip memory” exports from Korea to Taiwan & Malaysia is a goodpredictor for HBM revenue of Samsung & SK hynix. The data being granular down tothe province & city of exporters further enables us to make the separate prediction forSamsung (from S. Chungcheong province) & SK hynix (from N. Chungcheong province& Icheon), with R2at 0.89 & 0.98, respectively. Prediction isn’t perfect and there werediscrepancies between the data & HBM revenue of companies (4Q24 for Samsung & 1Q25for SK hynix), but overall the predictive power is good enough for us to report these risks toinvestors in this report. Yipin Cai, CFA+852 2123 2669yipin.cai@bernsteinsg.com HBM is mostly shipped to Taiwan, but some to Malaysia, likely for high-end Intel CPUs.Mobile memory for example is “multichip memory” too, but they’re mostly shippedto China, Hong Kong & Vietnam for handset assembly and hardly to Taiwan. The surge of“multichip memory” to Taiwan starting early 2024 coinciding the expansion of TSMC’sCoWoS indicates Taiwan is the destination of most HBM exports. “Revenue/weight” datarising at the same time also supports this. Same reasons indicate a small part of HBM wasshipped to Malaysia, as HBM is used in high-end Sapphire Rapids server CPUs which Intelpackages & tests in Malaysia. Samsung probably shipped US$0.5-1B HBM to Hong Kong/China in 4Q24 butstopped afterwards.Using the methodology mentioned above, we detected some HBMshipment to Hong Kong, likely from Samsung, as revealed by exporter location. Dataindicated Samsung ceased to do that after the US banned HBM exports to China in Jan,2025. We estimate about US$0.5-1B HBM was shipped, likely mostly HBM2E & HBM3,equivalent to 450-650M Gb, or 2-3% the total HBM bit shipment this year. “Revenue/weight” data can be directionally suggestive of HBM price moves.Unitdata isn’t reliable, but “revenue/weight” data correlates loosely with HBM prices. Thecorrection happened in 2024 when HBM shifted from HBM3 to 3E, & again in 3Q25 when3E moved from 8hi to 12hi. We thus hope “revenue/weight” data can shed light on HBM4price later. We plan to track this regularly in the future.We find the data reliable, as it correlateswith company HBM revenues, and is also consistent with the import data reported by Taiwan customs. The data is monthly, available on the 15thday of the following month.This means we potentially can have visibility 75 days before earnings release, and morereliable checks 45 & 15 days in advance. As a result, we plan to check this data & report thefindings regularly in the future. BERNSTEIN TICKER TABLE INVESTMENT IMPLICATIONS Samsung Electronics:We rate Samsung Electronics Outperform with price target of KRW 95,000. SK hynix :We rate SK hynix Outperform with price target of KRW 400,000. DETAILS Korea export data suggested an upside risk to Samsung’s 3Q25 HBM revenue & a downside risk to SK hynix’s. •We found the South Korea export data allows us to precisely identify the exports of HBM. We compared the data overtime with the HBM revenues suggested by Samsung and SK hynix, and found strong correlation between them. Hence webelieve this is a good way to track HBM revenues of Samsung and SK hynix on a monthly basis. And with the Sep export dataavailable, we found the data reveals healthy sequential HBM revenue growth in 3Q25, in line with our estimate (Exhibit 2).What surprised us is the data indicates only flattish QoQ HBM revenue for SK hynix in 3Q25, and therefore downside to ourexpectation (Exhibit 5). On the other hand Samsung HBM revenue is indicated to see ~2x growth in 3Q25, above our forecast(Exhibit 7). •We believe HBM is classified as “Multichip Memory IC” by Korea Customs (HS code 8542323000). And we only include theexport to Taiwan & Malaysia as 1) the vast majority of HBM is shipped to Taiwan given this is where CoWoS production takesplace, & 2) some HBM is likely shipped to Malaysia as Intel packages some high-end Sapphire Rapids CPUs with HBM there.We overlaid the monthly export data with combined HBM revenue from Samsung and SK hynix and found they exhibit goodcorrelation, both rising quickly in early 2024, correcting in 1Q25 and rising again in 2Q25 (Exhibit 1). Comparison of quarterlydata even better illustrates how the two time series track together, and the regression between the two series gives R2 of0.97 (Exhibit 2-Exhibit 3). •Korea custom also provides the breakdown by location of the exporter, and the data shows that exports almost a