The South Korean stock market, the KOSPI, is not an investment-grade asset, even though the country is home to two of the world’s premier technology companies: SK Hynix and Samsung. The simple truth is that the Korea Composite Stock Price Index is too volatile, illiquid, and prone to extreme speculation to be an appropriate destination for investment and diversification.
This is unfortunate because SK Hynix and Samsung, together with Micron, effectively control the market for high-bandwidth memory chips, which are essential components of Nvidia’s accelerated computing platforms. In addition, these three companies dominate the broader market for memory semiconductors. Likely for several years to come, both high-bandwidth memory chips and conventional memory semiconductors will remain in extremely short supply. This severe supply-demand imbalance has driven memory chip prices sharply higher, and the share prices of all three companies have soared. Each stock is up more than 100% this year.
