Market View

American chip stocks fell about 5 per cent on 14 September after Anthropic’s chief executive called for a slowdown in model development, and the hyperscalers that buy the chips rose. Korea fell harder than the American chip index, then closed higher the next day while US chips kept falling. The reason being credited is long-term supply contracts, and those are the same figures Samsung gave on 30 July, not new ones. TrendForce’s own explanation of why high bandwidth memory contract prices have lagged spot contains the problem: the three large suppliers negotiate those contracts annually, which is the mechanism Micron used to describe its old agreements rather than its new take-or-pay ones. The defence that does hold is physical. By 2027 high bandwidth memory is estimated to take about 30 per cent of wafer input to deliver 13 per cent of bits, new capacity does not ramp until the second half of 2027, and Nvidia is already cutting the memory stack on Rubin Ultra because of what it expects to be unable to buy.

TSMC’s Form 20-F for the 2025 fiscal year states that most of its production facilities are in Taiwan, and names the outbreak of military conflict, war or hostilities in its risk factors. That is TSMC describing its own exposure in a document it signs. The nearer constraint is dateable and already running: on its 16 July earnings call TSMC said advanced packaging capacity was tight enough to limit customer growth, and that it would welcome competing packaging technology taking some of the load. Samsung Electronics is the one company outside Taiwan that has told the market in its own release that it is winning leading-edge work now, disclosing expanding 2nm design wins for high-performance computing on 30 July. Packaging is not wafer allocation and a design win is not a shipment, so we say what each document does and does not carry. Four claims that travel with this story, including the Taylor capacity figures and a prospective Google allocation, are named and withheld because no body publishes them under its own name.

On 12 August, the day after CoreWeave’s second-quarter results, Samsung Electronics closed up 6.7 per cent and SK hynix up 5.5 per cent, and the Kospi tripped a program-trading curb. The day before, Korea published the largest ten-day semiconductor export figure in its history and the same two stocks did almost nothing. We searched every document CoreWeave has ever filed with the SEC: Samsung appears zero times, SK hynix zero times, HBM zero times. All its GPUs are NVIDIA’s and its three largest suppliers are unnamed. Meanwhile Korean exports to the United States fell 0.2 per cent in the record window while exports to China rose 134.8 per cent, and the Bank of Korea’s own indices show most of the growth is price rather than volume. This is a sentiment link rather than a demand link, and the two come apart on the day sentiment turns.

Korean coverage of this cycle keeps arriving at the same trade: sell the memory makers, buy the companies that equip them. We tested it against reported quarters only, and the filings point the other way. Memory makers earned operating margins of 70 to 80 per cent in their latest quarters against 29 to 37 per cent at ASML, Applied Materials, Lam Research and Tokyo Electron. Korea is about a fifth of revenue at all three tool makers that disclose it, Applied’s Korea revenue was flat in dollars year on year while its total grew 11 per cent, and Tokyo Electron’s Korean peak was the March quarter. Wonik IPS, the closest listed proxy for Korean memory capex and the only one of the three most-named suppliers to have reported June, disclosed revenue down 10.6 per cent and operating profit down 49.5 per cent at an 8.5 per cent margin. EO Technics went the other way, which is the point: this is dispersion, not a sector call. We print no target prices and no ratings, and we say which material we are declining to reproduce.

Samsung told analysts on 30 July 2026 that it plans to put 60 to 70 per cent of its memory capacity under long-term contracts, and that figure has become the main reason given for expecting a gentler memory cycle. We went looking for the documents behind it. Micron discloses take-or-pay agreements its own executives say cannot be cancelled, price floors that hold for the term, 16 signed deals covering about a fifth of its DRAM volume, and roughly 100 billion dollars of remaining performance obligation inside its accounts. Samsung gave its number in a spoken answer and left it out of the earnings deck, SK hynix has published no percentage at all, and the sufficiency decimals circulating in Korean coverage come out of an 18,000-dollar subscription datasheet. We also correct the SK hynix capital expenditure figure that nearly everyone is quoting wrongly.

HYBE filed its largest first quarter on record after BTS released ARIRANG on 20 March 2026, with album revenue up 98.9 per cent and concert revenue down 42.8 per cent in the same three months. That split is the whole problem with owning an agency: the money arrives when an album lands and waits when a tour has not started. One layer down, Dear U sells a monthly subscription to hear from an artist and ran a 33.3 per cent operating margin in 2024 against HYBE 8.4 per cent in its record quarter. We set the sourced figures against the ones circulating without a filing behind them, and mark the two we refuse to print.

SK hynix filed a 76 per cent operating margin for the second quarter of 2026 and the shares fell anyway. The Financial Supervisory Service documents margin loans at 37.3 trillion won and forced liquidations up more than sevenfold, so the selling has a mechanism that earnings are not part of. We also set out the one piece of confirmed damage that cuts against the case, and the connection we could not evidence.

Part two of two. Korean cosmetics exports grew between 30 and 300 per cent across the major European markets through 2025, and 10.7 million visitors came to Korea in the first half of 2026, 26.9 per cent above the same half of 2019. Neither case is as strong as the American one, and we set out what the growth rates hide and which connection we could not evidence.

Korean cosmetics exports rose 27.3 per cent in the first half of 2026 and the United States held its place as the largest buyer for a second year. NielsenIQ puts 41 per cent of American beauty sales online, which is where K-beauty has done nearly all of its winning. The 59 per cent that still happens in shops is what Olive Young’s Sephora rollout only begins to reach from autumn 2026.

Valuation reform, an MSCI upgrade and the memory cycle are usually presented as three reasons to own Korea. MSCI declined again in June, governance reform has no measurable outcome yet, and first-half semiconductor exports rose 162.6 per cent against 16 per cent for everything else. That leaves one variable, not three.