SEOUL — South Korea's SK Hynix, the world's second largest memory chip maker, reported a net loss for the fourth straight quarter due to weak chip prices and softening global demand for electronics.
Net loss was 53.3 billion won ($46.4 million) in April-June compared to a 473 billion won profit a year earlier, the company said on Thursday.
Sales dropped 4.6 percent year-on-year to 2.63 trillion won and operating profit declined 94.9 percent to 22.8 billion won.
However operating profit moved into the black compared to three months earlier when the chipmaker reported an operating loss of 260 billion won.
The company, which became part of the SK Group in March, competes with Samsung Electronics in the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chip market and with Japan-based Toshiba in the NAND flash memory market.
Analysts said SK Hynix was likely to return to net profit in the second half due to strong demand for portable electronic devices.
"Tablet PCs, such as Google's Nexus 7, Amazon's Kindle Fire 2, Apple's smaller-sized iPad and its new iPhone 5 device will be sequentially launched (in the second half), which will drive strong demand for NAND flash memory chips," said Kim Young-Chan, an analyst at Shinhan Investment Corp.
-- Dow Jones Newswires contributed to this report --
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