Haelangdal
Founder Analyst
AI infra · macro · mega-theme research
Recent Reports
- Research·Jul 20, 2026·96 min
A Comparative Study of Memory Cycles — Five Winters, and a Sixth Question
Across thirty years and five memory winters, demand never once died — supply grew faster than demand, and share prices always broke one to two quarters ahead of earnings. The correction since the June 2026 peak — SOX −20.2%, KOSPI −28.5% — is unfolding alongside record earnings, consistent with the leading pattern repeated in all five precedents. DRAM contract-price growth has decelerated from the 90%s in Q1 to a 13-18% Q3 forecast, placing the price cycle in its late-upcycle phase. This cycle's three novel structures — the HBM wafer valve, token demand elasticity above 1, and five-year take-or-pay contracts — raise the floor of a downturn rather than prevent oversupply, and each carries an unverified limit. The battleground is when the 2027-28 capacity wave flips the sign of the growth gap, and how deep the downturn runs — minus 50% or minus 15%.
- Research·Jul 20, 2026·59 min
The Great Open-Weight Migration — the Four-Layer Remapping of AI Margins After K3
Moonshot AI's 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model Kimi K3 is not an event that evaporates AI margins — it is the starting gun of a great migration that moves margin from the model layer to the infrastructure layer. Around K3's release the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 20.2% from its peak into a technical bear market and $3.3 trillion of global semiconductor market cap evaporated. But split the AI value chain into four layers — closed labs, serving providers, hyperscalers, neoclouds — and the sign of the shock differs by layer. Open weights attack only the frontier-gap premium; lock-in and regulatory premiums hold, and the compute to build gets compressed while the compute to serve gets bigger. The benefit ranking runs hardware including memory, model-neutral AWS and vertically integrated Google, then spot neoclouds and heavyweight serving, while the pressure concentrates on second-tier closed models and long-tail serving. The only malignant path is a four-step domino from Layer 1 margin compression through an OpenAI IPO disappointment into hyperscaler capex cuts — and adjudication runs on an observation calendar that starts with Alphabet's earnings on July 22.
- Research·Jul 19, 2026·15 min
Weekly Market Review: Week 29 (July Week 3)
July Week 3 (7/13-7/16) was the week AI-chip deleveraging took the controls of KOSPI — over four sessions the index swung -8.95%, +0.73%, +6.24%, -6.37%, leaving amplitude but no direction. On Black Monday 7/13, KOSPI collapsed -8.95% to 6,806.93, surrendering the 7,000 line for the first time in two months and triggering the seventh circuit breaker of the year — SK Hynix -15.37%, Samsung -10.70%. The +6.24% surge on 7/15, fueled by cooling US CPI, was given back within a day. On 7/16 alone, the Bank of Korea's first rate hike in three and a half years, the regulators' single-stock leverage curb (a 30 million won deposit, cash only), and fear of ChangXin Memory's record $8.55 billion STAR Market IPO all converged, and KOSPI closed the week down -6.37% at 6,820.60. The week lost -8.77%, a second straight weekly rout. Yet the won strengthened from 1,501.4 to 1,480.4, and on 7/16 retail bought 4.8 trillion won against 5 trillion of institutional and foreign selling. On 7/17, while Seoul rested for Constitution Day, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index closed -20.2% below its peak, entering a bear market — Seoul opens Monday carrying that decline. The watchpoints: SK Hynix earnings on 7/22 and the asymmetric window before the curb takes effect on 8/5.
- Research·Jul 16, 2026·16 min
Anatomy of a Deleveraging — When Korea's Leverage Curb Lands on the Momentum Unwind
Korea's July 16 curb on single-stock leveraged products does not cause the deleveraging — it layers a retail releveraging block on top of a global momentum unwind already in motion. KOSPI fell 6.37% on announcement day, stopping twenty points above Goldman's 6,800 support, and the products' net assets had already shrunk 40% from peak before the rule. The curb removes the mechanical buyer of rallies first while the mechanical seller of declines persists — the window before early-August implementation is the most asymmetric stretch. Micron is the #1 holding of US momentum indices and Samsung plus SK Hynix are a third of MSCI EM Momentum, so Korea's crash and the US momentum breakdown are two faces of the same factor. Two institutional cohorts have largely sold; the remaining variable is retail capitulation.
- Research·Jul 15, 2026·36 min
ChangXin Memory (CXMT) — The Price of the Listing Venue: Deconstructing China's DRAM Champion IPO
In the STAR Market IPO of ChangXin Memory, China's DRAM champion, the first variable setting the post-listing valuation is neither DRAM prices nor the HBM technology gap but the listing venue itself. At an 8.66-yuan offer price and a 57.9-billion-yuan raise it is the largest STAR Market IPO ever, with a day-one float of just 6% of shares outstanding. The dual-pricing structure — the same Chinese semiconductor asset trades at a 30% discount in Hong Kong and at multi-fold premiums in A-shares — is the identity of the 2-3 trillion yuan consensus. The global memory yardstick caps the company at 1 trillion yuan; supply-demand and the A-share yardstick pay the rest. The premium expires in July 2027 when the lockups release, and for Korea's memory big three the listing is near-term neutral and a post-2028 trough-amplitude variable.
- Research·Jul 15, 2026·25 min
The City on the Wafer — Why the Front End Matters
Semiconductor front-end investing is not a game of "who will win" but of "how large the total will be." The front end (Front-End) is the stage that stacks and sculpts invisible circuits layer by layer onto a silicon wafer, and the center of gravity of the semiconductor equipment market sits here. Of the roughly $133 billion in global semiconductor equipment sold in 2025, wafer fab equipment (WFE) accounted for $115.7 billion — the vast majority — and SEMI projects this market to grow to $135.2 billion by 2027. The front-end equipment market is where AI infrastructure capital, starting in hyperscaler data centers and passing through the memory big three's CapEx, is ultimately paid out. Two keys unlock the front end. The economics of the clean room — a single leading-edge fab costs $20 billion, three-quarters of which is not the building but the roughly 2,000 tools inside the clean room — and the step-by-step oligopoly, in which ASML holds 100% of EUV lithography, Tokyo Electron 90% of coater/developers, and KLA 56% of metrology. These two interlock so that a forecast of total CapEx becomes a forecast of equipment-maker revenue, and the typical one-to-two-year lag from announcement to revenue recognition decides the trade timing. Korea's materials-parts-equipment names (Wonik IPS, Jusung Engineering, Eugene Technology, Tes, PSK, HPSP, Dongjin Semichem) are a one-year-lagging derivative of this structure. June's rally pre-reflected much of the expectation, and this primer rebuilds that structure's skeleton from scratch before continuing into Part 2, the back end.
- Research·Jul 13, 2026·11 min
The Identity of the 4.5x Forward P/E at the Memory Makers — A 4x Earnings Rebound Decomposed With Customs Data
The real reason the three memory makers' 12-month forward P/E has been compressed to 4-7x (Samsung 4.5, Hynix 4.7, Micron 6.8) is not undervaluation but that the market has already priced in a 3-4x earnings rebound. This report decomposes that rebound using Korea Customs export data. Customs leads earnings by 5 weeks to 5 months (the March flash led Micron's FQ3 by 23 days), the export increase is entirely price rather than volume, and price amplifies into margin (OPM 66-81%) and EPS. Only if Japanese semiconductor equipment exports turn positive and reignite capacity additions does this logic reverse.
- Research·Jul 12, 2026·15 min
Weekly Market Review: Week 28 (July Week 2)
July Week 2 (7/6-7/10) was the week Samsung's record earnings became the trigger for an AI-chip crash — while Seoul sold peak-out fear, New York answered SK Hynix with the largest IPO ever by a foreign company. On 7/7, Samsung posted record Q2 preliminary revenue of 171 trillion won and operating profit of 89.4 trillion won, yet crashed -7%, and KOSPI collapsed -4.91% as an intraday drop of around 8% triggered a circuit breaker. On 7/8, 'Black Wednesday' added -5.35% for a two-day cumulative -10%, and KOSDAQ surrendered the 800 line — but the decline was led by institutions, and foreigners turned net buyers after 13 sessions of Sell Korea. The reversal came in a two-day Thursday-Friday rebound (+0.62%, +2.52%), and on 7/10 SK Hynix debuted on the Nasdaq at a $149 offer price, raising $26.5 billion — the largest US IPO ever by a foreign company, surpassing Alibaba in 2014 — closing its first day up 13% at $168.01. The domestic shares rose 5% intraday before pulling back to -0.27%, and the won actually eased to 1,501.4 even in the crash. To compress the week into one line: record earnings, read as peak fear, broke two days, but that same week US capital bet $26.5 billion on 'what comes next.' Next week brings the 7/13 ADR regular-ticker conversion and the first verdict of the peak-out debate on the road to Samsung's final results.
- Research·Jul 12, 2026·30 min
AI Data Centers' New Bottleneck, Power Delivery — Where SiC and GaN Power Semiconductors Sit
The real bottleneck in AI data centers is no longer compute but power delivery — carrying electricity to the rack. As rack power leaps from 120kW to 600kW by 2027, the current running through a legacy 54V distribution exceeds what copper can carry. That is why NVIDIA rebuilt the architecture around 800V high-voltage DC (HVDC) and named onsemi and Infineon as silicon partners. This report frames where power semiconductors (SiC, GaN) sit in the AI infrastructure bottleneck chain.
- Research·Jul 7, 2026·19 min
Who Pays for Memory — Four Payment Channels and a Redrawn Contract Map
The memory bill is settled not by one market but by four wallets paying with different money: hyperscaler direct purchases of $220 billion a year, a $170 billion device channel, $60 billion of HBM gated by Nvidia, and Stargate. The contract map has been redrawn in a single year. Micron signed 16 deals carrying a $100 billion minimum and $22 billion in prepayments; SK hynix uniquely removed the price cap; and Samsung and SK signed a letter of intent with OpenAI's Stargate equal to 40% of the world's DRAM. A phase in which the buyer finances the supplier's capex is the extreme of a seller's market and an inversion of the payment chain. But the fastest-growing wallet (Stargate) is the thinnest — because OpenAI, which reserved 40% of the world's DRAM, is projected to lose about $14 billion in 2026 and the source of its money is Oracle's borrowing. Best read alongside the companion piece 'Changing of the Wallet — The Final-Payer Thesis.'
- Research·Jul 6, 2026·43 min
Documents, Not Shovels — The Stock-Price Grammar of Memory Capacity Cycles
Not once was a memory stock broken by the shovel of expansion — a fab groundbreaking. What broke stocks was documents — analyst reports, earnings guidance, contract news. This report spreads out the last two memory cycles like a historical ledger and tests that grammar. It then rules on which phase of past cycles the simultaneous Korea–US–Japan expansion wave and the early-July crash actually match. The new variable this cycle is the LTA (long-term supply agreement), a contract that locks in multi-year volume and price between supplier and customer in advance. How this structure — rebuilt around cap removal, prepayments, and multi-year terms — rewrites the old formula is the axis of the three-company analysis. The verdict signals arrive in order: Samsung preliminary earnings (7/7), the SK hynix ADR (7/10), whether the Q3 contract-price hike sticks, and Meta's capex (capital spending) guidance. Three variables stay under constant watch: the direction of consensus (the average of analyst estimates) estimates, the second derivative of contract-price momentum (whether the pace of increase is speeding up or slowing down), and the direction of LTA structure.
- Research·Jul 5, 2026·15 min
CXMT Is a Gauge, Not a Threat — What China's DRAM IPO Measures About the Memory Shortage
The +719% revenue surge in Chinese DRAM maker ChangXin Memory's (CXMT) IPO filing is not an invasion indicator threatening the Big 3 — it is a gauge measuring the depth of the memory shortage. With single-digit market share barely moving while revenue grew sevenfold, price made that number, not volume. Apple's China memory card was exposed as an empty bluff by Tencent's 20-billion-yuan pre-emption deal in late June. NAND contract-price increases (+70–75%) overtook DRAM's (+58–63%) for the first time, meaning the shortage is spreading, not easing. This bullish confirmation expires at FY27; from FY28, CXMT's IPO-funded capacity buildout refilling commodity DRAM's marginal supply must be monitored as a separate track — and that track's switch is held by Washington, not technology.
- Research·Jul 5, 2026·14 min
Weekly Market Review: Week 27 (July Week 1)
July Week 1 (6/29-7/3) was the most volatile week of the AI-chip-led rally: KOSPI, which had doubled in the first half (+101%), crashed -7.89% in a single day and rebounded +5.76% the next. The trigger was Meta's 7/2 announcement of a cloud business entry — the market read it as a signal of AI compute oversupply, and Samsung fell -9.1%, SK Hynix -14.6%, while foreigners dumped more than 5 trillion won in one day. The same day, USDKRW closed at 1,555.8, the highest since 2009 — a 17-year milestone — and KOSPI entered an -18.5% correction from its 6/18 intraday record of 9,385.59. The reversal came at night. June US nonfarm payrolls rose just 57,000, half of expectations, breaking the dollar; on 7/3, KOSPI surged +5.76% on 4.5 trillion won of institutional buying and a buy sidecar, reclaiming 8,000 in a single day. The won also unwound, falling 30.2 won to 1,525.6. In the US, the Dow set a record close in a shortened 7/2 session, and markets were closed for Independence Day on 7/3. Next week brings SK Hynix's Nasdaq ADR listing on 7/10.
- Research·Jul 5, 2026·14 min
Weekly Market Review: Week 26 (June Week 4)
Week 26 (6/22–6/26) was defined by extreme volatility: KOSPI set an all-time high on Monday then suffered two circuit breakers before the week was out, tracing a nearly 7% round-trip in both directions. The index closed Monday at 9,114 — its first close above 9,100, a historic record — then crashed -9.99% (8,203) on Tuesday, a record 910-point drop that triggered a circuit breaker. Wednesday and Thursday delivered back-to-back rebounds of +3.26% and +5.42%, pushing KOSPI back to 8,930, only for Friday to bring another -5.81% plunge (8,411), the year's fifth circuit breaker. In the eye of the storm, Micron reported fiscal Q3 revenue of $41.46 billion and EPS of $25.11 — beating consensus by roughly 23% (after-hours +13%) — and guided Q4 revenue to $50 billion with an 86% gross margin, putting hard numbers to what the market had been calling a memory supercycle. Yet that supercycle immediately sent its invoice: Apple and Microsoft announced product price increases due to surging memory costs, converting chip-maker margins into consumer electronics inflation. The week in a single sentence: prices swung wildly, but the underlying AI capital cycle never stopped — it just ran through such a narrow channel (a handful of memory names) that the waves grew enormous.
- Research·Jul 5, 2026·20 min
Higher HBM Mix, Safer Stock? — How Base Die Logic Migration Shifts AI Memory Margin to Foundries
The conventional wisdom that a higher HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) mix means a safer stock has a hole in it. From HBM4, the base die becomes a leading-edge logic chip, and part of AI memory's value migrates from the three memory makers to foundries. HBM4 is the first generation in memory history to split the core die (DRAM process) from the base die (logic process), and who builds that logic die determines where the margin is booked. SK Hynix and Micron are handing their base dies to TSMC or moving that way, while only Samsung Electronics builds core, base, and packaging in-house — a vertical integration it formalized as a roadmap at the SAFE Forum on July 1. But Samsung's road is an expensive bet carrying a pricier node and yield risk. After the July 2 rout and July 3 rebound, it is time to re-grade the market's habit of trading all three names on the single phrase 'HBM mix.'
- Research·Jul 5, 2026·15 min
The K-Bio Map — Out-Licensing, CDMO, Obesity Drugs: Three Investable Axes
K-bio is not a contest of drug-originating science but an investment landscape best read as three axes riding the global pharma cycle through capacity, platform, and patents. In 2025 Korean pharma-bio out-licensing topped KRW 20 trillion for the first time, and Alteogen's subcutaneous platform proved the reality of royalty contracts with the US approval of subcutaneous Keytruda. Yet as the KOSPI more than doubled in the first half, healthcare indices fell double digits, with Alteogen's 2% royalty-disclosure shock the trigger for the neglect. As the first coverage of this mega-theme across 89 reports, it reads three axes — CDMO (Samsung Biologics), platform out-licensing (Alteogen, Yuhan), biosimilars (Celltrion) — through triggers and an event calendar rather than target prices.
- Company·Jul 3, 2026·21 min
SK hynix Nasdaq ADR — Anatomy of a 43 Trillion Won Deal and the Premium Equation
SK hynix's Nasdaq ADR (American depositary receipt) listing is not a fundraising event — it is a re-rating bet, an attempt to reprice a memory champion trapped in KOSPI multiples on the same stage as Micron. On July 6 the company refiled, cutting the deal size from a maximum of 45 trillion won to roughly 43.1 trillion won (about $29 billion) — a deal whose offering size breathes with the share price. If completed, it would surpass Alibaba and Aramco as the largest-ever US listing by a foreign company. Two coordinates to watch: where the final offer price lands on July 10, and the standalone premium created by the 2.5% conversion cap separating the underlying shares from the ADR.
- Company·Jun 21, 2026·18 min
SK Square — Buying HBM Leader SK Hynix at a Discount
SK Square is a way to buy SK Hynix, the true global leader of the memory supercycle, at a discount through a holding-company window. About 98% of its net asset value (NAV) is its SK Hynix stake, making it effectively a lever on SK Hynix, and in 2026 a narrowing NAV discount (from an average 66% toward 46%) made that exposure even more attractive. But the stock is exposed to two prices at once — SK Hynix's share price and the discount rate — so it acts as a lever on the way up and a double hit on the way down.
- Research·Jun 20, 2026·16 min
The Pulled-Forward Future — The AI Capital Cycle's Repayment Chain and the Accounting of Inference Margins
The AI capital cycle is a structure that has pulled both demand (PC, memory) and capital (bonds, equity) forward from the future into the present, and the whole chain's ability to repay hangs on one variable — the durability of the inference margin. Two events signaled from both ends of the chain at once: NVIDIA's first $25 billion bond issuance since 2021, and Amazon cutting AI-asset useful life from 6→5 years against its own earnings. The inference margin is a race between falling token prices (the downward force) and rising depreciation from shortening economic life (the upward force), with the latter hiding behind accounting to inflate reported earnings. This piece links demand, capital, inference margins, depreciation, real demand and reflexive flows into one chain, using Amazon's disclosures as an honest measuring stick to locate the weak point.
- Company·Jun 20, 2026·17 min
Tokyo Electron — The 90% Coater Monopoly Every EUV Wafer Must Pass
Tokyo Electron is the monopoly in semiconductor coater/developer track tools — the equipment that coats and develops a wafer just before and after EUV exposure — with about 90% of the global market. Because ASML's EUV scanner cannot run without passing this gating step, ASML's scanner volumes become Tokyo Electron's coater volumes. Fiscal 2026 (ended March 2026) revenue hit a record JPY 2,443.5B, and first-half fiscal 2027 guidance is JPY 1,570B, up 33% year over year. The stock trades around JPY 75,360 with a market cap of roughly JPY 34T (about $212B) as of June 2026.
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