'검은 월요일'의 역설: 반도체 슈퍼 사이클과 시장의 공포가 마주친 날 > K-wave Trends

The direct cause of this market crash is the rapid cooling of the US semiconductor market. When Broadcom's performance guidance was evaluated as failing to meet market expectations, major AI semiconductor stocks, including NVIDIA, fell like dominoes. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index recorded its largest drop since the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, sharply dampening investment sentiment across technology stocks. In particular, as the US employment indicator was released stronger than expected, expectations of the Federal Reserve's interest rate cut receded, which stimulated the excessive valuation burden concentrated on technology stocks. These external negative factors accelerated the outflow of foreign funds into large semiconductor stocks in the domestic stock market, resulting in a wider decline in the index.

However, contrary to market fears, the fundamentals of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are still at an all-time high. With the explosive growth of the AI ​​inference market, demand for next-generation memory products, including high-bandwidth memory (HBM), is overwhelming supply, leading to predictions that the two companies will break performance records again in one quarter. Some say that the memory semiconductor supply bottleneck will continue until 2030, and they are making aggressive investments, and the operating profit ratio is also securing a dramatic increase in profitability, exceeding that of TSMC, the leader in the foundry industry. In other words, the current stock price plunge is interpreted not as a decline in the company's intrinsic value, but as a phenomenon caused by fatigue from the steep rise so far and the desire to realize short-term profits combined with external variables from the United States.

The warmth of the semiconductor industry is heating up not only the stock market but also the real estate market. Residential areas around Samsung Electronics' Pyeongtaek Campus and SK Hynix's Yongin Cluster recorded a growth rate that exceeded that of core areas in Seoul, with a series of reported transactions due to expectations of a boom in the semiconductor economy. This is the result of a combination of industry workers who prefer to live close to home and investment demand to preoccupy future value, showing that the real estate market is strongly linked to the growth of the nation's key industry, such as semiconductors. However, this overheating pattern is also a variable that can lead to regulatory risks, such as the government's designation of land transaction permit zones. It is positive that industrial growth leads to vitality of the local economy, but a cautious approach is needed regarding the regulatory possibilities hidden behind it.

Investors must again be wary of investing in leveraged products during this plunge. Recently, investment funds are being focused on single-stock leveraged ETFs that use Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix as underlying assets, but in highly volatile markets, leveraged products can fall into a fatal trap called 'negative compound interest'. If stock prices rise and fall repeatedly, the erosion of principal accelerates due to the leverage effect, and there is a risk of incurring much larger losses than ordinary stocks during long-term investment. The reason financial authorities constantly warn about the risks of leveraged products is because of these structural vulnerabilities. Therefore, rather than being tempted by short-term returns and making unreasonable leveraged investments, this is a time when an essential asset allocation strategy that can withstand market volatility is desperately needed.

Meanwhile, the rapid progress of Chinese memory companies amid the abundance brought about by the semiconductor super cycle poses another challenge to Korean companies. China's Changshin Memory (CXMT) has been narrowing the technology gap by quickly entering the profitable sector by expanding its domestic AI infrastructure investment and benefiting from US sanctions. Although there is still a technological gap with Korean companies, the Chinese government's full support and aggressive R&D investment are likely to pose a threat to the mid- to long-term market competitive structure in the future. Korean semiconductor companies are faced with the task of breaking through this phase of intensifying competition not only by simply expanding production capacity, but also through constant innovation and market diversification strategies to maintain super-gap technology.