The same company, the same six months, and two headlines that read like opposites: a record quarter, and a half-year that shrank.
Both are accurate.
HANMI Semiconductor CO., LTD. records revenue not on the day a machine is built, but on the day the customer receives it and accepts it.
HANMI Semiconductor CO., LTD. (한미반도체) · KRX: 042700 · KOSPI
Won amounts are converted at ₩1,337.9 per US dollar (Bank of Korea ECOS, KRW/USD base rate, 2026-09-10) for scale only.
The machine that presses stacked DRAM together
Finished DRAM dies are stacked one on top of another, and then heat and pressure are applied at the same time to press them into a single block.
Memory built that way is called HBM — DRAM stacked upward to raise the speed at which data moves.
The machine that does the pressing is a TC bonder, short for thermocompression bonder, and that is what HANMI Semiconductor makes.
The company was founded in 1980 and builds back-end semiconductor equipment. Back-end is the later stage that cuts, attaches and inspects finished chips into a form that can actually be used.
It also makes equipment that cuts, cleans, inspects and moves semiconductor packages, and die bonders that attach chips to substrates.
The shares trade on the KOSPI, the main board of the Korea Exchange, under ticker 042700. (KOSDAQ is the separate, smaller-company board.)
So what this company sells is not something a consumer buys. It is capital equipment that a chip plant installs on its line — no shelf space, no advertising.
That changes where the money starts. Revenue here does not begin when people buy something; it begins on the day a chip maker decides to add line capacity.
Which leaves one question: when does that decision land on this company’s books?
When money actually lands on the books
Picture a workshop that builds furniture to order. While it spends four months on a single wardrobe, its bank balance sits at zero, and on the day the piece is delivered and the customer says it is fine, the whole payment arrives at once.
HANMI Semiconductor is built the same way. It takes an order, designs and builds the equipment, and records a sale when the customer receives that equipment and accepts it.
The point is the timing: revenue is booked on the day the machine is handed over, not the day it was made.
While equipment is being designed and built, however busy the floor is, nothing shows up as revenue. The moment the customer accepts it, the entire value drops into one quarter. Swings between quarters are therefore not a company alternating between good and bad three-month stretches — they are a question of which column the acceptance date fell into.
Which produces results like this. According to Korean media reports, first-quarter 2026 revenue was KRW 50.9 billion (about $38 million) and operating profit KRW 8.5 billion (about $6 million).
The very next quarter, reported second-quarter 2026 revenue was KRW 251.2 billion (about $188 million).
Did the company become five times larger in three months? Reported cumulative revenue for the first half of 2026 was KRW 302.1 billion (about $226 million), which spread evenly over two quarters works out to about KRW 151.0 billion (about $113 million) each. Both quarters are that figure pushed forward or backward.
The company did not suddenly perform five times better in the second quarter. The month it handed the machines over happened to fall in the second quarter.
The workshop analogy breaks down at one point. A workshop has dozens of customers whose acceptance dates scatter, which smooths its account.
Here, a single machine carries a large price and the buyers are few, so one customer’s line-expansion schedule can move an entire quarter. There are simply not many customers for the timing to spread across.
Why the record story and the decline story run together
Once that structure is in hand, the contradiction resolves.
According to Korean media reports, consolidated second-quarter 2026 revenue was KRW 251.2 billion (about $188 million) and operating profit was KRW 130.3 billion (about $97 million). Consolidated means the parent and its subsidiaries combined, as opposed to separate — standalone — figures for the parent alone.
Against the same quarter a year earlier, revenue was up 39.5% and operating profit up 51.0%, and it was the largest quarterly revenue since the company was founded. Operating margin for the quarter was 51.90%.
Group the same year into a half and the picture inverts. Cumulative first-half revenue of KRW 302.1 billion (about $226 million) and operating profit of KRW 138.8 billion (about $104 million) were, on the same reported basis, 7.7% and 11.0} lower than a year earlier.
The record figure measures three months. The decline measures six. The first quarter goes into the half-year column but not into the quarterly one, so two opposite headlines about the same six months are true at the same time.
Both stories are right. They differ only in where the ruler is laid down — cut to three months it is a record, stretched to six it is a decline.
Which column the acceptance date fell into is what makes that difference.
Revenue up, operating profit down, net income up
The sections above were about where you cut the period. There is a second kind of mismatch, of a different type.
Stretch the window to a full year and revenue and profit still do not move together.
Korean filings number fiscal years from a company’s founding, so the 46th fiscal period is FY2025; the annual report for it was filed on 2026-03-12.
The annual report shows consolidated revenue rising from KRW 558.9 billion (about $418 million) to KRW 576.7 billion (about $431 million).
Operating profit went the other way, from KRW 255.4 billion (about $191 million) to KRW 251.4 billion (about $188 million), while net income rose from KRW 152.6 billion (about $114 million) to KRW 214.0 billion (about $160 million). Total assets moved from KRW 710.9 billion (about $531 million) to KRW 813.3 billion (about $608 million).
When a headline pairs this company’s name with a number, the first thing to establish is which line of that table the number came from. Read only the revenue line and it was a better year; read only the operating profit line and it was a worse one — and both are disclosed figures from the same fiscal period.
Expressed as operating profit per 100 of revenue, the prior year works out to 45.7 and FY2025 to 43.6. Sales grew, and what was left per 100 sold fell by a little over two.
This company already has a year on record where revenue, operating profit and net income each pointed in a different direction. Pick whichever of the three lines you prefer, and you can write opposite stories about the same twelve months.
Where the next machine appears before the news does
The three sections above all end in the same place: the past results table alone will mislead you. Which leaves one question — where should you look instead?
What happens next is written into disclosures before it reaches the news.
According to Korean media reports, the company received an order worth KRW 44.2 billion (about $33 million) from SK hynix for TC bonders for HBM4, and that order is described as investment to expand HBM4 production capacity. The same reports say the company is carrying out an eighth-plant investment of KRW 130.0 billion (about $97 million).
How large is KRW 44.2 billion (about $33 million) for this company? Set against FY2025 consolidated revenue, it is roughly 7.7% — about one thirteenth of a year’s revenue captured in a single contract.
Filings themselves are received by DART, Korea’s electronic disclosure system, run by the Financial Supervisory Service. Anyone can search it by company name.
The company’s own filings include the following.
- Order-related disclosures — what was sold, and for how much.
- A decision to acquire tangible assets — where you see whether production capacity is being added; the company’s filing was received on 2026-08-18.
- A notice of an investor relations presentation — what the company intends to explain, received on 2026-08-19.
- Voluntary disclosures, including a corporate value-up plan and other management matters — filings the company made without being required to.
- A report of holdings in the company’s securities by Kwak Dong-shin, filed as an officer and major shareholder.
Which ruler to hold against these numbers
To put it together: this company’s quarterly numbers jump around not because it alternates between doing well and doing badly every three months, but because the full price of a machine lands in the period the customer takes delivery.
That is how a record quarter and a first half down 7.7% can both be true of the same six months, and how a fiscal year can show revenue up, operating profit down and net income up again.
These figures are closer to a delivery-and-acceptance schedule than to a report card.
So the first thing to check in any article about this company is not the size of the number but how many months it measures — a quarter, a half, or a year — and which line it refers to: revenue, operating profit, or net income.
Attach those two things to the number and most of the headlines that sounded contradictory line up.
What is public stops here: results through the second quarter of 2026, the August filings on the tangible-asset acquisition and the investor relations presentation, and the reported KRW 44.2 billion (about $33 million) order and KRW 130.0 billion (about $97 million) eighth-plant investment.
When that equipment is handed to the customer, and which quarter’s revenue it becomes, the filings cited here do not show. There is no way to establish it except to wait and check the disclosure.
Going a step further and saying what comes next is not something this article can do — the arithmetic is here, and the judgment belongs to the reader.
Frequently asked questions
Q. What does HANMI Semiconductor actually make?
A. It makes back-end semiconductor equipment. That includes TC bonders, which stack several DRAM dies and press them together with heat and pressure to build HBM; equipment that cuts, cleans, inspects and moves semiconductor packages; and die bonders that attach chips to substrates. The company was founded in 1980, and it sells equipment that chip plants install rather than anything a consumer buys.
Q. What exactly does a TC bonder do?
A. TC bonder is short for thermocompression bonder. Building HBM requires stacking several DRAM dies upward, and this machine applies heat and pressure together to press those chips into one piece. Think of it as the machine at the end of the stacking process that turns the stack into a single unit.
Q. Revenue went from KRW 50.9 billion (about $38 million) in the first quarter of 2026 to KRW 251.2 billion (about $188 million) in the second. Did the company get five times bigger?
A. No. The company records revenue at the point the customer receives and accepts the equipment, so quarterly revenue can diverge sharply depending on which quarter the acceptance month falls in. On reported figures, cumulative revenue for the first half of 2026 was KRW 302.1 billion (about $226 million), which divided across the two quarters is about KRW 151.0 billion (about $113 million) each.
Q. I have seen both ‘record high’ and ‘down year on year.’ Which one is correct?
A. Both. Taken on its own, the second quarter of 2026 was, according to Korean media reports, the company’s largest quarterly revenue since founding and up 39.5% from the same quarter a year earlier. Bundle the same year into six months and cumulative first-half revenue was 7.7% lower than a year earlier. The only difference is where the period is cut.
Q. Doesn’t profit rise when revenue rises?
A. Not necessarily. The annual report for FY2025 shows consolidated revenue rising from KRW 558.9 billion (about $418 million) to KRW 576.7 billion (about $431 million) while operating profit fell from KRW 255.4 billion (about $191 million) to KRW 251.4 billion (about $188 million), and net income rose from KRW 152.6 billion (about $114 million) to KRW 214.0 billion (about $160 million). The three lines pointed in different directions in the same year.
Q. Where can I read the original filings rather than a summary?
A. DART, Korea’s electronic disclosure system run by the Financial Supervisory Service, lets anyone search filings as received by entering the company name. Relevant document types include order-related disclosures, decisions to acquire tangible assets, notices of investor relations presentations, and voluntary disclosures. For this company, the tangible-asset acquisition decision was received on 2026-08-18 and the investor relations notice on 2026-08-19.
Sources
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This article explains company filings and published figures for information only. It is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Figures can change after publication — check the original filings before making decisions.