SK hynix will work on reducing semiconductor production costs to respond to growing market uncertainties sparked by the coronavirus outbreak, its CEO Lee Seok-hee said Friday.

Sharing this year's business plan with investors, Lee said the company, which mainly sells DRAM and NAND flash memory chips, will concentrate on "building up muscle" by pursuing low production costs and raising asset efficiency.

"The year of 2020 was expected reduce the inventory burden and see a demand recovery centering on demand from servers and mobile devices, but uncertainties are looming large as the market has been affected by the spread of the coronavirus," Lee told shareholders during the annual meeting at its headquarters in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province.

Lee said the company will try to launch DRAM and NAND flash chips in 2020 that it finished developing last year to cut production costs. It will also improve product quality management to expand market volume and optimize its investment portfolio to raise asset efficiency.

SK hynix completed development of a 16-gigabit DDR4 DRAM on the third-generation 10 nanometer production process last year, improving competitiveness.

The company also started mass producing 128-layer 4D NAND flash memory chips last year. To produce NAND chips with higher density, SK hynix incorporated peri under cell (PUC) technology that stacks peripheral circuits under the cell into the charge trap flash (CTF) structure, which is commonly used to produce 3D NAND chips.

During the meeting, shareholders voted to reelect Lee as a director and Park Jung-ho, CEO of SK Telecom, as board chairman. Shin Chang-hwan, a Sungkyunkwan University professor, was also reappointed as a director. Han Ae-ra, a law professor at Sungkyunkwan University, was named as a new director. Their terms expire in March 2023.

Amid concerns over the spread of the coronavirus, SK hynix restricted the entry of non-shareholders and conducted temperature screening at the entrance. It also advised shareholders to wear face masks. To follow social distancing guidelines, the company left spaces between seats.

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved