Key points
- Three security stocks hit their daily upper limits
- The Kosdaq fell 1.95% the same day
- AhnLab, the biggest, rose 3.85%
- XGate trades at 78 times earnings
Three small Korean cybersecurity companies hit their daily upper limits on Friday, one day after Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang called cybersecurity the next major use of artificial intelligence. The Kosdaq index fell 1.95 percent in the same session.
XGate (엑스게이트, 356680) closed at 16,060 won, up 29.94 percent. SandsLab (샌즈랩, 411080) closed at 5,510 won, up 29.80 percent. Katis (카티스, 140430) closed at 2,315 won, up 29.91 percent. Korean exchanges cap a single day's move at 30 percent, and eleven Kosdaq stocks finished Friday at that ceiling, EBN (이비엔) reported.
The wider market went the other way. The Kospi fell 1.76 percent on Friday to 6,909.91, back under 7,000, with Samsung Electronics down 3.53 percent and SK Hynix down 2.16 percent.
Huang spoke on September 10 at the Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco. "Cybersecurity will likely be the next major use of AI, and it's going to run continuously, and so it will be a great new business opportunity," Huang said. Asked why the subject is drawing so much attention right now, Huang gave a blunter answer. "The reason why there's so much conversation today about cybersecurity is because the industry is getting ready to launch some products, and what better way to create demand than to create a problem," he said. We covered the US side of those remarks separately.
What the three companies actually do
XGate supplies firewalls, virtual private networks and intrusion prevention systems. It's also developing a VPN built on quantum cryptography and an AI firewall, Wide Economy (와이드경제) reported. SandsLab sells cyber threat intelligence built on AI. Katis supplies security platforms to government offices, nuclear plants, airports and data centers, and it's working on quantum security and an edge AI system for security robots.
Huang didn't name a Korean company, and Korea didn't come up in the remarks.
What SandsLab is actually part of
SandsLab belongs to a consortium selected for a government-backed AI project. On September 3 the Ministry of Science and ICT selected a Naver Cloud consortium to build a cybersecurity-specialized AI foundation model, choosing it over a competing SK Telecom consortium, ZDNet Korea (지디넷코리아) reported. The government is supplying computing resources on the scale of 256 Nvidia B200 GPUs rather than the chips themselves, ZDNet said. SandsLab is one of 33 institutions in the group, which also includes LG AI Research, LG Uplus and KAIST. The support runs 10 months, and a review after the first five decides whether the rest of it continues, Boan News (보안뉴스) reported. None of the coverage says how much of the work or the money is SandsLab's.
The government project predates Friday's rally. Korean coverage identifies no fresh company announcement accompanying the move.
The biggest security company in Korea rose 3.85 percent
AhnLab (안랩, 053800) is the largest listed cybersecurity company in the country. It closed Friday at 59,300 won, up 3.85 percent, which is a strong day and well short of the 30 percent limit. Its market value is about 660 billion won ($492M). XGate is worth about 458 billion won ($342M), SandsLab about 84 billion won ($63M) and Katis about 25 billion won ($18M).
The trading points the same way. XGate traded 208.6 billion won of stock on Friday against AhnLab's 14.2 billion won, about 15 times AhnLab's trading value by our arithmetic. Its share volume was 14.3 million on Friday, against 758,380 on Thursday.
How the valuations compare
XGate trades at about 78 times its earnings for the past year and more than nine times book value, on Naver Finance's figures. Katis trades at about 33 times earnings. SandsLab lost money over the past year, so it has no earnings multiple at all, and it trades at about 1.7 times book. AhnLab, the one with steady profits, trades at about 13 times earnings.
Those multiples are what a reader has to weigh against a remark that mentioned no Korean company and no Korean order. Huang's own explanation for the attention was that the industry is getting ready to launch products. That was a comment about the cybersecurity industry, not about these three companies.
Huang's remarks are quoted in their original English. Won figures are converted at 1,340.40 won to the dollar, the Naver Finance rate on September 11, 2026.
