SK hynix headquarters in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province (Yonhap)

SK hynix Inc. said Thursday it posted losses for the fourth consecutive quarter in the third quarter of this year but recovering demand for high-performance products helped narrow its operating deficit.

The world's second-largest memory chip maker said in a regulatory filing its operating losses amounted to 1.79 trillion won ($1.32 billion) for the July-September period on a consolidated basis, compared with a profit of 1.67 trillion won a year ago.

Net losses came to 2.18 trillion won, plunging from a net profit of 1.1 trillion won a year earlier. Sales fell 17.5 percent to 9.06 trillion won.

The loss was 74.3 percent higher than the average estimate, according to a survey by Yonhap Infomax, the financial data firm of Yonhap News Agency.

SK hynix said sales of its flagship products, including the AI memory HBM3 and high-capacity mobile DRAM, led to a 24 percent on-quarter increase in sales and a 38 percent decrease in operating loss.

"As market demand for our high-performance memory products continued to grow, our operating performance has steadily improved after hitting the bottom in the first quarter," the company said in a statement.

"Most importantly, our D-RAM business, which swung to the red in the first quarter of this year, turned back to profitability after two quarters." (Yonhap)