Chipmaker Kioxia expects April-June net profit to rise 47-fold on AI boom

Tokyo [Japan], May 17: Japanese chipmaker Kioxia Holdings Corp said Friday it expects its net profit for the April-June period to increase more than 47-fold from a year earlier to 869 billion yen ($5.7 billion) amid rising demand for semiconductors used for data centers to run booming artificial intelligence.
As a leading producer of NAND flash memory chips, which enable large amounts of data to be stored, the company also reported that its net profit for the year ended March more than doubled from the previous year to 554.49 billion yen, hitting a record high for the second straight year.
The company booked 870.37 billion yen in operating profit for fiscal 2025, up 92.7 percent on sales of 2.34 trillion yen, a 37.0 percent increase.
"Driven by strong momentum of AI demand, the company achieved record sales and profits, surpassing previous highs for the second straight year," Kioxia President and CEO Hiroo Ota said at an online briefing.
"With AI becoming part of the foundation of social infrastructure, strong demand in the flash memory market is expected to continue," Ota said, with the company expecting NAND demand to outpace supply in 2027 as well.
For fiscal 2025, sales of memory products for consumer devices such as smartphones grew about 1.5-fold and those for industrial applications including data centers increased around 1.4-fold.
The Tokyo-based company did not announce the earnings outlook for the full year through March 2027, given the possibility of market volatility stemming from geopolitical risks, such as the Middle East conflict.
For the April-June quarter, Kioxia projected its net profit to more than double compared with the just-ended January-March quarter, with an operating profit of 1.30 trillion yen on sales of 1.75 trillion yen.
The forecast is based on an assumed exchange rate of 159 yen to the U.S. dollar, compared with 155 yen in the last quarter of fiscal 2025. A weaker yen usually boosts the value of overseas profits when repatriated.
Kioxia is on track to significantly surpass its fiscal 2025 earnings in the first quarter alone, with plans in the current business year to boost production of mainstay products amid robust demand and to launch next-generation models.
It will also invest roughly 450 billion yen in capital spending to strengthen its production base.
The company said it does not currently expect any negative impact on sales and procurement from the Middle East conflict, citing its diversified procurement sources.
The chipmaker was spun off from Toshiba Corp in 2017 and was renamed in 2019. It debuted on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's top-tier Prime Market in 2024.
According to the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics, the global chip market is expected to grow 26.3 percent in 2026 from a year earlier.
Source: Qatar Tribune