Key points
- Samsung rose 4.13% to 239,500 won ($169 USD) and led the Kospi up 0.73% to 6,345.53.
- SK Hynix stayed flat, up 0.35%, still under last week's Nvidia memory-cut worry.
- August chip exports rose 155.4% in the first 10 days, easing fears memory prices had peaked.
- Samsung also has foundry and robot businesses. SK Hynix rises and falls on memory alone.
On Tuesday, August 11, Samsung Electronics rose 4.13% to 239,500 won ($169 USD) in Seoul, its second straight gain, and carried the Kospi up 0.73% to 6,345.53. SK Hynix, the stock that has led this market all year, stayed flat. It closed up 0.35% at 1,425,000 won ($1,005 USD).
For most of the year, it was the other way around. SK Hynix was the name carrying Korea's AI-memory rally, and Samsung was the one that couldn't get its own high-bandwidth memory up to speed with what Nvidia wanted. Lately, that's started to reverse, and Tuesday was the clearest sign yet.
The day began with good news for both companies. Korea's customs office reported that exports in the first 10 days of August were $21.3 billion, up 45.3% from a year earlier, and that chips alone brought in $10 billion, up 155.4%. That matters because the biggest fear hanging over Korean chip stocks this summer has been that memory prices already hit their top and would only keep falling. A strong export month pushes back on that fear.
Lee Kyung-min at Daishin Securities (대신증권) said the export figures reset the mood. "With the August export numbers led by semiconductors made public, the market reconfirmed the earnings momentum for chips, and because of that some of the worry about memory prices passing their peak has eased," Lee said.
That explains why chips rose. It doesn't explain why Samsung rose more than ten times as much as SK Hynix on the same news. The difference is that Samsung has more than one story right now.
One is its foundry business, the part of Samsung that builds chips to order for other companies. It's landed Tesla as a customer and is getting a plant in Texas ready to make those chips on its newest process. The other is robots. In July, Samsung pulled its scattered robot projects together into a single team and put it directly under Noh Tae-moon, who runs its device business. Neither business is large next to memory, but both give investors a reason to own Samsung that has nothing to do with the memory cycle. That's part of why it's held up better than SK Hynix, and why the same export news lifted it so much more on Tuesday.
SK Hynix doesn't have a second story. It makes memory, and mostly it makes the high-bandwidth memory that goes inside AI chips, so it rises and falls on that one thing. Right now that one thing has a question mark over it. Last week a US report said Nvidia is testing versions of its next chip that use less of that memory, and SK Hynix fell about 15% in two days on the news. The export data helped it stop falling, but it wasn't enough to make it rise the way Samsung did.
So the same market lifted both stocks by very different amounts, and the reason is what each company is beyond memory. SK Hynix still earns more from AI memory than Samsung does, and both had just posted their best quarters ever two weeks earlier, so none of this is about the money either one is making today. What changed on Tuesday is that the market paid up for the company with somewhere else to grow.
Meanwhile, foreign investors and institutions were the buyers that held the index up, while Korean individuals sold 72.4 billion won ($51 million USD) more Kospi shares than they bought.
Sources
- 뉴스핌, [마감시황] 코스피, 반도체 강세에 강보합...6300선 회복, on the August 11 Seoul close and the Daishin Securities analysis
- 이비엔뉴스, 코스피, 6345.53으로 마감...삼성전자 강세 속 이틀 연속 상승, on Samsung leading the index and the day's net buying
- Our earlier coverage: the Rubin Ultra memory-cut report and Samsung and SK Hynix's record quarters
Figures are converted at about 1,418 won to the US dollar. Quotes originally in Korean are translated. This is general market commentary and not investment advice.
