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Investing.com - Macquarie downgraded Hanmi Semiconductor Co (KS:042700) to Neutral from a previous higher rating, while significantly lowering its price target to KRW90,000 from KRW170,000.
The downgrade comes as SK Hynix seeks to diversify its thermal compression bonder (TCB) vendor base, according to Macquarie. This diversification effort gains importance as high bandwidth memory (HBM) becomes increasingly critical in AI chips and its bill of material costs rise.
Macquarie noted that an incident in May, when Hanmi recalled service engineers, likely reinforced SK Hynix management’s determination that risk control should take priority over reliance on a single supplier.
The research firm highlighted that Nvidia is pushing for HBM4 data transfer rates exceeding 10Gbps, while Micron’s planar base die makes meeting such requirements technically more challenging.
Micron is placing more aggressive TCB orders for 2025 compared to SK Hynix, but Macquarie indicated that 2026 orders could decline unless HBM4 demand heavily concentrates on Micron and the company executes aggressive capacity expansion—conditions the firm considers far from certain.
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