GeoMarketSignal

  The first three parts of this series asked three different questions if KOSDAQ is really expensive. What separated its greatest winners from thousands of failed growth stories? And when does a small Korean growth company become investable to a much larger pool of institutional and global capital? Now time to ask the question that matters most, where might the next generation of KOSDAQ winners come from? The easy answer would be to produce a list of fashionable industries - AI with semiconductors, robotics, rechargeable batteries including ESS, biotechnology, nuclear power, aerospace and defense. But KOSDAQ has never lacked fashionable industries. The harder task is identifying where four forces are beginning to converge: Structural demand growth Difficult-to-replicate technology Commercial validation Improving investability That is the framework we will use for the final chapter of Series 2. Because the next great KOSDAQ investment is unlikely to be defined by the lowest valuatio...

For decades, investors in Korean memory stocks learned a counterintuitive lesson: sometimes, the time to become interested was when the price-to-earnings ratio looked expensive — and the time to become cautious was when it looked cheap. There was a reason. Memory semiconductors were among the world's most cyclical industries. At the bottom of the cycle, collapsing memory prices crushed earnings. P/E ratios could rise dramatically even as share prices approached a bottom. Near the top of the cycle, the opposite happened. Memory prices and profits surged, earnings expanded rapidly, and P/E ratios fell. Stocks could suddenly look remarkably cheap precisely when the earnings cycle was becoming increasingly mature. For this reason, investors in companies such as Samsung Electronics and SK hynix could never rely on P/E alone. P/B, inventory levels, memory pricing, capital expenditure, capacity utilization and expectations for the next supply cycle all mattered. Then came artificial intel...