SK Hynix recently successfully replaced Samsung and became the world's largest DRAM manufacturer, mainly due to the company's acquisition of decisive HBM customers such as NVIDIA. As for Samsung, it has lost its long-term DRAM dominance and...
SK Hynix recently successfully replaced Samsung and became the world's largest DRAM manufacturer, mainly due to the company's acquisition of decisive HBM customers such as NVIDIA. As for Samsung, it has lost its long-term DRAM dominance and has its largest decline in market share this year.
With the rise of AI and being promoted by advanced HBM technology, SK Hynix has won the crown of DRAM industry. According to Korean media reports, since the release of the record began in 1999, Samsung has suffered the largest decline in market share this year. In six months alone, the company's market share plummeted from 41.5% to 32.7%, a decrease of 8.8 percentage points.
report pointed out that the main reason for this sharp decline was that Samsung failed to successfully acquire HBM orders from customers such as NVIDIA, and thus lost the large DRAM customer base. Although Samsung is currently pushing forward to HBM3E and supplying goods to AMD and Broadcom, it has not yet entered the NVIDIA supply chain and has not seen any signs of re-raising its market share.
According to the half-year report released by Samsung last Thursday (14th), the company's DRAM market share (calculated in terms of revenue) in the first half of 2025 was 32.7%, a significant decline from 41.5% at the end of 2024. Before that, Samsung's largest single decline occurred in 2017, when its market share fell from 48% in the previous year to 45.8%, a drop of 2.2 percentage points.
Now, Samsung's DRAM market share has fallen to 30% again, the first time in nearly a decade, and the last time was in 2014, when it was 39.6%.
In contrast, SK Hynix, a NVIDIA supplier, has continued to rise stably under the generic AI craze driven by ChatGPT, from 27.7% in 2022, 29.9% in 2023, and 33.4% in 2024. In the first half of this year, SK Hynix's market share reached 36.3%, surpassing Samsung for the first time in 33 years. More importantly, SK Hynix has taken the lead in mass production of HBM4 solutions and is far ahead of the competition.
At the same time, SK Hynix has also strengthened its cooperation with large American technology companies through its Silicon Valley subsidiary. SK hynix America earned 24.7 trillion KW (about US$17.79 billion) in the first half of this year, up 103% from the 12.2 trillion KW.
SK securities analyst Han Dong-hee pointed out that HBM production will also affect the supply of general DRAM. HBM contracts are the most important factor in memory market outlook. Even with the competition, SK Hynix is expected to maintain its advantages in the short term.
Samsung said it will expand its market share through a diversified DRAM product combination, strengthen its plan to continue to operate with profit as its core in the second half of the year, and will actively respond to the trend of high-capacity AI servers, providing products including HBM, high-capacity DDR5 and LPDDR5x servers.
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