The sharp decline in the Korean stock market cannot overshadow the boom in memory chips! The global economy “canary” South Korea's exports are expected to soar 59% in July

The Zhitong Finance App learned that according to a survey report for economists released on Thursday, South Korea's exports, which have the title of “global economic canary,” may continue to grow strongly in July. Although the growth rate will slow down from the previous highest export growth rate in half a century, it is still expected to record the second strongest export growth rate in this round of continuous export growth cycle driven by a surge in global AI computing power demand.

Memory chips — critical to South Korea's exports and the South Korean economy. Korea is home to SK Hynix and Samsung, the two largest memory chip manufacturers in the world. Among them, SK Hynix, the global HBM hegemon, has been Nvidia's core HBM storage system supplier in recent years. Another South Korean storage giant, Samsung, is the world's largest supplier of DRAM and NAND memory chips, and has also recently become Nvidia's HBM supplier, especially the GB200/GB300 series HBM storage system supplier, which is Nvidia's current flagship AI computing power cluster product, which dominates AI chips.

As breakthrough AI application tools such as AI agents penetrate into various industries around the world, bringing about sky-level “AI inference terminal computing power requirements,” this means that the future prospects for AI computing power infrastructure construction such as AI chips, HBM storage systems, enterprise-grade SSDs, and high-performance networks and power equipment will still be a sea of stars. Furthermore, the end-side AI boom will also bring demand for consumer electronics-grade DRAM and NAND storage to a new round of growth curve.

South Korea's exports surged 59% in July, and the sharp decline in the stock market diverged from the trade boom

According to the median forecast of 15 Korean economists according to an institutional survey, South Korea, the fourth largest economy in Asia and a global trade weather vane, is expected to see a sharp increase of 59.0% in July compared to the same period last year.

This growth rate will be slightly lower than the almost crazy surge of 70.7% in June — this export growth rate was the biggest increase since 1978, but South Korea's export growth rate in July is still expected to be the second highest year-on-year growth rate in this continuous export growth cycle starting in June 2025.

Analysts said that Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix continue to drive a sharp increase in exports to South Korea as the global surge in AI data center investment and construction scale drives up memory chip prices.

Ha Keon-hyeong, an economist at Shinhan Securities, said, “A large part of the growth rate is reflected in the rise in semiconductor trade prices. The increase in shipments was relatively moderate.”

According to data compiled by Korea's statistics department, in the first 20 days of July, South Korea's exports increased sharply by 52.3% compared to the same period last year. Among them, exports of semiconductors dominated by memory chips surged by about 180.6%.

Park Sang-hyun, an economist at IM Securities, said, “Given the continuing boom in semiconductor demand and exports, the strong internal momentum of South Korea's exports is unlikely to change much.” He pointed out that part of the slowdown in growth was due to fewer working days than in July last year.

The results of this investigation came at a time when the South Korean stock market was violently sold off. The benchmark stock index, the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI Index), has fallen by more than 30% this month due to market concerns related to extreme deleveraging, clearing overcrowded positions, and slow optimism in AI capital expenditure.

Since this year, the South Korean stock market can be described as having experienced frequent break-outs. Recently, KOSPI plummeted 10.84% on July 28, fell sharply by 12.6% during the session on July 29, and triggered a 20 minute suspension of trading in the entire market, eventually closing down 5.98%; the sharp decline for two consecutive days caused it to retreat about 40% from its June high, and the market value evaporated by more than 2 trillion US dollars. Meanwhile, as early as July 17, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 20% from its record high on June 22, confirming that it has entered a technical bear market. By around July 29, the maximum retracement was close to 30%. This is no longer an adjustment to the Korean single market, but a cross-market liquidity shock caused by Korea's leveraged ETFs, global quantitative momentum, semiconductor congestion positions, and AI valuations.

The “wreath of condolences” in front of the South Korean National Assembly escalated a financial deleveraging incident into a political and regulatory crisis: Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix together account for nearly half of KOSPI's market value, and retail investors also placed highly concentrated bets through double-daily leveraged ETFs. The decline in the target price forced the fund to reduce its exposure to derivatives, forming a feedback path of “falling stock prices — rebalancing sales of ETFs — margin recovery — falling stock prices again.”

As a result, the Korean government plans to limit individual investment in such products to less than 20% of total investment assets, increase transaction costs and simulated transaction requirements, and raise the minimum cash threshold to 30 million won from July 31; previously, it had also suspended new product launches and product advertisements, and began establishing a legal basis for emergency market stabilization measures. These measures are not equivalent to the announced use of “equalization funds,” but they mean that the policy response function has been upgraded from investor education to directly suppressing the increase in leverage and providing market support tools when necessary.

SK Hynix announced a record profit for the second quarter on Wednesday, but it fell short of investors' extremely high expectations, further exacerbating the market decline.

Samsung Electronics' results on Thursday showed a record increase of more than 250 times in its semiconductor business profit in the second quarter. Demand for AI chips and memory chips is expected to continue to be strong this year, and there will still be a shortage of supply, but the South Korean stock market will still fall on Thursday.

The survey report for economists also showed that economists' imports from South Korea in July will increase 26.6% over the same period last year, down from the 30.0% increase in June. The median trade surplus forecast for July was US$29.59 billion, which means it is expected to be lower than the previous month's US$36.09 billion.

South Korea is scheduled to release market-focused export trade data for July at 9:00 a.m. local time (00:00 GMT) on Saturday, August 1.

South Korea — the most typical beneficiary of the memory chip supercycle

The underlying logic that South Korea's chip exports continue to surge is not simply “GPUs are selling more,” but rather that AI computing power architectures are shifting from centralizing computing chips to collaboratively expanding computing, storage bandwidth, capacity, and interconnectivity. Large model training requires repeated handling of model weights, activation values, gradients, and optimizer states; after entering the age of inference and agents, long contexts, concurrent users, and continuously running agents will rapidly expand KV Cache.

The calculation speed of Tensor Core is faster than the data supply speed of traditional external storage, so the system bottleneck is increasingly “whether data can be delivered to the computing core in a timely manner” rather than pure peak computing power. By vertically stacking multiple layers of DRAM, expanding I/O channels, and being close to the GPU package, HBM pushes the bandwidth per power consumption to a level that is difficult for traditional memory to reach, thus upgrading from GPU supporting components to core components that determine the actual utilization rate of AI accelerators.

This demand has a clear double multiplier effect of “increased stand-alone content x increased number of servers”. The Nvidia H100 is configured with about 80GB HBM, and the bandwidth exceeds 3TB/s; Blackwell Ultra has a maximum configuration of 288GB HBM3E and a bandwidth of 8Tb/s; the new Rubin can be equipped with 288GB HBM4, increasing the peak bandwidth to 22Tb/s. In other words, AI platform iterations not only increase the number of GPUs deployed, but also continuously increase the HBM capacity, bandwidth, number of stacking layers, and package complexity required for each accelerator. SK Hynix's HBM4 uses 2,048 I/O channels, the bandwidth is about 2.54 times that of the previous generation, and the energy efficiency is increased by more than 40%, precisely to mitigate the increasingly severe “memory wall” between model size and data movement speed.

More importantly, the HBM boom will reverse the boom in general-purpose DRAM, server DDR5, low-power server memory, and enterprise-grade SSDs. Producing HBM requires multiple high-specification DRAM chips, large wafer area, TSV stacking, and advanced packaging. After manufacturers prioritize production capacity to high-profit HBM, the effective supply of traditional DRAM is naturally tightened; at the same time, the CPU side of AI servers still requires high-capacity DDR5 or SOCAMM, and inference data, vector databases, and KV Cache will also drive up enterprise-level SSD demand. SK Hynix clearly stated that HBM investment is improving general DRAM supply and demand, while AI data center demand for DDR5 and eSSD servers is simultaneously becoming a new pillar of growth.

Based on Samsung Electronics' closing price of about 207,000 won and SK Hynix's closing price of 1,322,000 won on July 30, 2026, Wall Street financial giant Nomura's target price of 670,000 won for Samsung Electronics means a potential increase of 225% over the next 12 months, and a potential increase of about 255.5% for SK Hynix's 4.7 million won target price.

The Nomura analyst team said that Samsung and SK Hynix should no longer be simply viewed as traditional storage stocks that rely on PC and mobile phone cycles, but should be redefined as structural growth assets for AI infrastructure. The judgment was based on three points: AI training, inference, and data center expansion kept storage demand higher than supply expansion; HBM and general storage entered a resonant supercycle; the price-earnings ratio of the two companies, which was about 6 times higher than that of TSMC, was significantly lower than the level of about 20 times that of TSMC, which did not fully reflect the sustainability of profits and the increase in ROE. As a result, Nomura drastically raised Samsung's target price from 590,000 won to 670,000 won, and SK Hynix drastically raised from 4 million won to 4.7 million won.