Korean Stock & Equity Research

Korean Equities/Company Deep Dives

Korea's most unglamorous export success story might be seaweed. In the first half of 2025 alone, Korea exported $594 million worth of dried and seasoned seaweed, hit $1 billion in exports for the year by early November, and now commands roughly 70% of the global seaweed trade. The story behind that dominance involves a Thai snack company, Chinese coastal pollution, US rice surpluses, and a warmi..

Korean Equities/Company Deep Dives

In the span of about a week in July and August 2026, three unrelated stories quietly asked the same question: is the massive spending and hype behind AI and next-generation chip manufacturing actually justified? Elon Musk revealed he's betting Terafab on a lithography technology that's eluded the entire chip industry for over a decade. Bond investors punished SpaceX's own debt just weeks after i..

Korean Equities/Company Deep Dives

On June 23, 2026, foreign investors sold 4.2 trillion Won of Korean equities in a single session, while Korea's National Pension Service sold only 300 billion Won — meaning the pension fund wasn't the main seller that day, despite widespread assumptions. Around the same time, halfway across the world, SpaceX's stock was being pulled higher not by earnings or news, but by a mechanical index-inclu..

Korean Equities/Company Deep Dives

Two seemingly unrelated legal battles are unfolding in Korea right now — one over HBM patents at the US International Trade Commission, the other over submarine cable trade secrets between two Korean manufacturers. Neither is really about the lawsuits themselves. Both are downstream consequences of the same AI infrastructure boom, which has made the underlying technology valuable enough to fight..

Korean Equities/Company Deep Dives

Yes, Xanax (alprazolam) is legal in South Korea — it's a standard prescription medication, and one of the most commonly prescribed benzodiazepines in the country. That puts it in a very different regulatory category from propofol, which we covered in an earlier piece as the one drug South Korea uniquely classifies as a narcotic. The more relevant question for most people searching this isn't dom..

Korean Equities/Company Deep Dives

Nvidia and six of Wall Street's largest financial firms are reportedly assembling a $500 billion financing alliance to fund AI data center buildouts. On paper, it looks like a straightforward infrastructure financing deal. Look closer, and the risk structure is nearly identical to a very different transaction that ended in bankruptcy: the sale-and-leaseback financing behind Korea's Homeplus reta..

Korean Equities/Company Deep Dives

On July 1, 2026, Korea's export data showed something that should have been unambiguously bullish: exports crossed $100 billion in a single month for the first time ever, with semiconductor exports breaking $40 billion for the first time. Instead, the market fixated on a single declining sub-metric, compounded it with worries from Apple and Meta, and spent the following week debating whether Kor..

Korean Equities/Company Deep Dives

At FMS 2026, the world's largest memory and storage industry event, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix unveiled two fundamentally different answers to the same problem: AI accelerators are increasingly bottlenecked not by compute power, but by how fast memory can feed them data. SK Hynix, partnering with SanDisk, is betting on capacity. Samsung is betting on proximity. Understanding both approache..