South Korea's two major memory giants, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, just posted their 'strongest-ever' financial reports. The two companies combined achieved an operating profit of nearly 40 trillion won (around $27.8 billion) in Q4 2025, which is equivalent to a net profit of $300 million per day. The key driver? The massive demand for HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). AI giants like NVIDIA, AMD, Google, and Microsoft have been lining up to grab their share. On the other hand, it's also due to technical barriers—there are only three companies in the world capable of producing HBM. SK Hynix holds 57% of the market, Samsung 22%, and Micron just 21%. This has driven the price of an HBM chip, about the size of a fingernail, to a staggering $400–500, making it more expensive than gold by weight. Another point is what we discussed a few days ago—last year, these memory manufacturers held back on expanding production capacity and instead kept raising prices, leading to skyrocketing profits. However, price hikes can only go so far. Recently, all the major players have announced capacity expansion plans to meet the surging demand. But judging by their plans, the expansions seem relatively measured, avoiding aggressive growth, which has actually fueled market expectations for both volume and price increases. How explosive will tonight’s flash memory earnings report be? Let’s wait and see!