Increasing signs of a maturing global smartphone market have fuelled expectations that last year’s boom in chip demand is moderating and so will earnings growth.

The South Korean chipmaker met market expectations with a 77 percent jump in first-quarter operating profit to $4 billion. That was short of last quarter’s best ever result, ending a run of four consecutive quarters of record profit.

TSMC warned last week of softer smartphone demand, cutting its revenue target and sending shares of key client Apple and as well as other chip firms lower, but like SK Hynix, the world’s No. 2 memory chip maker it was quick to stress it also had areas of strong growth up its sleeve.

SK Hynix head of DRAM marketing Sean Kim told an earnings briefing: “Although overall growth in smartphone sales will stagnate, China’s big four smartphone firms are leading the accelerated adoption of high-capacity chips.”

“As for servers, North American internet data centre firms as well as Chinese firms led by Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are increasing investment."

Prices for DRAM chips, which help devices perform multiple tasks, have risen as servers, gaming PCs and cryptocurrency mining devices demand more firepower to process large amounts of streaming data.

SK Hynix said growth for server DRAM chips was expected to outpace the overall DRAM market for the next two to three years, adding that compared to other chipmakers, server DRAM accounts for a bigger portion of its revenue.

Addressing concerns that DRAM prices could start to flatten out or even drop, the company said the industry needed to ramp up production capacity of multiple DRAM memory chips as currently supply was constrained by the technical difficulty of producing them.

Although prices for NAND chips, which provide long-term data storage, have fallen, SK Hynix said it did not expect supply to outstrip demand this year.