Key points
- A foil maker has doubled this year, and AI is only the indirect reason
- Sam-A makes foil for batteries used in systems supporting data centers
- Hana Securities sees a record year in 2027
- The "AI-adjacent" stock had already run and fallen once
Sam-A Aluminium (삼아알미늄) is not an AI company. It makes aluminum foil used in energy-storage batteries. But growing demand for battery storage, including at data centers, has turned the Korean manufacturer into an AI-adjacent stock story.
The shares closed at 55,000 won ($41) on September 22, down 2.65% that day but still up 131.1% this year, according to Hankyung (한국경제).
The Kospi is up about 66% over the same stretch, so this is a stock that has left the market far behind.
The foil works as a current collector inside a battery, carrying electricity in and out of the cell. Sam-A does not sell directly to data centers. Its link to AI runs through energy-storage systems. Data centers and their power suppliers are adding battery storage for backup and grid support, increasing demand for batteries and the foil inside them. North American energy-storage battery shipments grew about 83% in the first half of the year, according to Korean reporting.
How the data-center boom reaches a foil maker
Hana expects Sam-A's factories to fill as orders rise, and the brokerage thinks that is only the start. Han Yu-geon (한유건), an analyst at Hana Securities (하나증권), wrote in a note carried by NewsPim (뉴스핌) that Sam-A's order backlog for the third quarter is about 1.5 times the size of the second quarter's, and that plants running near half capacity at the end of last year should reach close to full by the second half of 2026.
Hana expects 2027 to be the best year in the company's history. In the brokerage's numbers, revenue reaches 478 billion won ($352M) and operating profit reaches 31.6 billion won ($23.3M), after Sam-A lost money as recently as last year. These are Hana's estimates, not results.
"North American data-center ESS orders, which began in earnest from April in the second quarter, are expected to be the key driver of Sam-A Aluminium's fundamental improvement this year," the Hana note said.
What the price already assumes
A stock that has doubled isn't a cheap stock. Sam-A trades at about 3.76 times the value of what the company owns on paper, and at about 26 times the operating profit Hana expects for 2027, by our arithmetic. For a company that was losing money a year ago, the price already assumes the record year shows up on schedule.
There's one more thing the "AI-adjacent" label leaves out. Sam-A isn't a quiet name anymore, and the easy move may already be gone. The shares touched 104,600 won ($77) in the middle of May, then lost nearly half of that by September. So the people calling the stock a data-center winner now are arriving after the first big run, and after the first big fall.
Sam-A is worth about 832 billion won ($613M) today.
Won figures are converted at 1,357 won to the dollar, the Naver Finance rate on September 22, 2026. The analyst comment is translated from Korean.
