Hanmi Semiconductor eyes $1.5 billion sales in 2026

Hanmi Semiconductor Co., South Korea’s leading chip packaging equipment manufacturer, has revised upwards its annual sales target for this year to 650 billion won ($471 million) to meet the growing demand for its machines amid the ongoing artificial intelligence chip boom.

“The company has raised its annual sales target to 650 billion won for this year, 1.2 trillion won for 2025 and 2 trillion won in 2026,” Kwak Dong-shin, vice chairman and chief executive officer of Hanmi Semiconductor, announced on Friday.

The company late last year set this year’s sales target originally at 450 billion won, which was revised up to 550 billion won earlier this year.

Hanmi Semiconductor earned 34.5 billion won in operating profit last year on sales of 159 billion won.

The upward revision comes as global AI chip demand is forecast to grow rapidly for a while, bodying well for the chip packaging equipment industry.

The global chip packaging equipment market is forecast to increase 48.8% to $61 billion by 2028 from $41 billion last year, according to the semiconductor information platform Techinsights Inc. That compares with 35.8% growth in chip equipment for the entire process.

AI chips are logic chips, processing the large volumes of data needed for AI workloads, and Nvidia Corp.’s graphics processing units (GPUs) are one of the most sought-after AI chips these days. And to run AI chips, high-performance memory chips, such as high bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, are essential.

Hanmi Semiconductor is Korea’s leading producer of thermal compression (TC) bonders required to produce HBM and 3D packaging. TC bonders use thermal compression to bond and stack chips on wafers that have finished processing.

Hanmi Semiconductor has been supplying its TC bonders to SK Hynix Inc., the world’s second-largest memory chipmaker that is also the world’s top HBM producer, supplying to Nvidia.

In April, Hanmi Semiconductor agreed to sign a 22.6 billion won deal with Micron Technology Inc. to supply TC bonders.

It is also expected to sign similar contracts with SK Hynix’s crosstown rival Samsung Electronics Co.

NEXT-GENERATION TC BONDERS

To meet the higher sales targets, Hanmi Semiconductor plans to roll out upgraded TC bonder models starting this year: 2.5D big die TC bonders in the second half of this year; mild hybrid bonders in the latter half of 2025 and hybrid bonders a year later.

The Korean chip packaging equipment maker produces TC bonders at its six factories located in Incheon, where its headquarters are.

Its newest sixth factory can churn out 264 units of TC bonders a year. It plans to ramp up the factory’s annual production capacity to 420 units next year, the largest capacity for TC bonder producers around the world.

With the increased capacity, Hanmi Semiconductor is expected to significantly shorten the lead time from the placement of orders to delivery of TC bonders, a big plus to the company amid growing orders for the equipment to meet surging HBM demand, Hanmi Semiconductor said.

The company plans to add new manufacturing facilities to ramp up TC bonder output to achieve its 2-trillion-won sales target in 2026.

Its shares ended up 3.3% at 165,400 won on Friday, snapping their six-day losing streak on concerns over intensifying competition in the local TC bonder market.

Its dominance in supplying TC bonders to SK Hynix as the sole provider ended earlier last month after the HBM chip giant signed a deal with Hanwha Precision Machinery Co. to receive the latter’s TC bonders.

SK Hynix is also testing TC bonders made by ASMPT, while Hanmi Semiconductor is reworking its TC bonders to improve the performance that can meet the requirements to produce SK Hynix’s latest HBM chips.

Despite the concern, high expectations for the AI chip boom led Hanmi Semiconductor shares to more than double for the year today.  

Write to Eui-Myung Park at uimyung@hankyung.com


Sookyung Seo edited this article.