Column · 2026-06-26
[Kwangsoo's Take] A Virtuous Cycle Between the Chip Boom and Consumption Recovery, Stalled by Volatility
Lee Kwang-soo reiterated that he had called for a chip-driven rally as early as September-October last year, restating his thesis that since chips account for nearly half of Korea's exports and over half of Kospi market cap, a chip boom directly drives export gains, trade surplus improvement, and upward GDP revisions, which in turn feed into consumer sentiment.
He emphasized that a stronger Kospi alone, by lifting household portfolio balances, boosts consumers' sense of spending power — an effect that will be reinforced further by trillion-won-scale performance bonuses expected at SK Hynix and elsewhere.
However, he pointed to excessive volatility in bellwether chip stocks as the reason this virtuous cycle isn't playing out smoothly. Abnormal overselling — such as LegoChem Bio trading below its conversion price, effectively a floor implicitly endorsed by the government and major investors — is, in his view, the root cause preventing investors from confidently rotating into second-tier follow-on plays.
He argued that leverage and mechanical ETF selling act as an amplifier, and that bellwether-stock swings are breaking the chain of thematic rotation that should otherwise spread gains across the market. With diverse-strategy funds having largely disappeared and capital concentrated almost entirely in chips, he called for pension funds and institutional investors to restore their role as seed capital across a broader range of strategies.
[Sidong's Take] Apple and Nokia — No Winner Lasts Forever
Park Si-dong traced Apple's operating margin since 2005, noting that Apple sustained margins in the 30% range for roughly 15 years after the iPhone's launch — and is now entering a new phase marked by price hikes driven by rising memory costs. He framed this as an open question over whether Apple can sustain its historically high profitability or is heading toward a different kind of transition.
He detailed the cautionary case of Nokia, the dominant handset maker before the iPhone, which dismissed the smartphone wave as a bubble and chose to wait it out — only to be pushed entirely out of the market. He drew a parallel to Apple's current cautious stance on AI investment, attributed to the belief that AI models will commoditize, making in-house investment unnecessary, and to a strategy of waiting for the investment bubble to deflate before buying in cheaply.
By contrast, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and Alphabet are aggressively expanding AI investment, even tapping bond issuance and equity raises to fund it. He flagged their upcoming late-July earnings as a critical inflection point that will reveal whether Apple's cautious approach or Big Tech's aggressive investment strategy was the right call.
Quoting Steve Jobs's 'stay hungry, stay foolish,' he questioned whether today's Apple — and Korean companies alike — still embody that spirit. He cited Samsung Electronics' and SK Hynix's Honam investment decision as a positive counter-example of proactively investing in the future rather than waiting on the sidelines.