SK Hynix and LG Display have both reported losses for the quarter and hope that Apple's new iPhone 5 help the component makers recover.
Apple is expected to release its latest iPhone in October, although the company itself has provided no timeline. As the top buyer of components such as screens and chips, Apple will help both Sk Hynix and LG Display sell their supplies and recover from limited demand.
LG Display reported a wider-than-expected quarterly loss Thursday, hit by a U.S. price-rigging penalty ($380 million) and weak demand for TVs. The South Korean display panel maker said it lost 112 billion won ($98 billion) in the April-June second quarter, much worse than the expected 28 billion won loss.
LG Display, which supplies panels to Apple and its affiliate LG Electronics, believes the tough market situation will not improve any time soon. The company hopes that shipments for Apple's new iPad will increase in the third quarter and will start supplying panels for Apple's new iPhone.
SK Hynix Co., which also supplies mobile chips to Apple, sank to a quarterly loss as oversupply battered mobile chip prices while demand for personal computers weakened.
The company said Thursday its net loss totaled 53 billion won ($46 million) in the April-June period on revenue of 2.6 trillion won.
Hynix blamed a steep drop in prices of NAND flash memory, which goes into smartphones and tablet computers.
Although Hynix gets around 40 percent of its dynamic random access memory chip revenue from global PC makers including Dell and Hewlett-Packard Co., upcoming launches of new personal computers, timed for the release of Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system, Google's Nexus 7 tablet PC launches around the world and new smartphones such as Apple's next iPhone could lift demand, according to the company.