SK Hynix captures the single largest slice of the AI-memory scarcity rent — roughly 62% of high-bandwidth memory, about two-thirds of NVIDIA's HBM4, sold out and pre-paid into 2027 — and earns it at a 72% operating margin and a ~61% return on equity. And yet it trades like a Korean memory-cyclical at a single-digit forward multiple. The rent shows up in the earnings, not the multiple. Management is so convinced of the mispricing that it is taking the company to Nasdaq specifically to force a re-rating against Micron — a rare case where the best fundamentals in the cluster come with the most explicit, dated catalyst. BULLISH, conviction MEDIUM: the lead is yield-and-trust rather than a monopoly — Samsung out-qualified it on HBM4 timing yet won only a quarter of the allocation — and two-thirds of HBM riding one customer is the risk that caps conviction. The structural driver underneath the share numbers is a physics gap: compute scales roughly 3x every two years while memory bandwidth scales only about 1.6x, so each accelerator generation needs proportionally more HBM than the last — 80GB on H100, 192GB on Blackwell, more again on Rubin. That is what makes this a rent rather than a cycle. The bottleneck widens with every generation instead of clearing. (Merged in from the retired "HBM Suppliers Are the Picks-and-Shovels of AI" call, 2026-08-03.)
SKHY tape reference, researched from primary sources (catalogue II item 71). The ADS exists: SK hynix listed 177,900,000 ADS on Nasdaq as SKHY on 2026-07-10 at $149.00/ADS (~$26.5B raised); each ADS represents one-tenth of one ordinary share (10 ADS : 1 ordinary share) — SEC EDGAR Form 424B4, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0002120882/000119312526299963/d32785d424b4.htm. Tape print: SKHY closed at $177.00 on 2026-09-04 (Yahoo Finance / stockanalysis.com historical data). At that ratio, $177.00/ADS implies $1770.00 per ordinary share. Converting at 1359.30 KRW/USD — the Seoul market close for 2026-09-04 per KB Kookmin Bank's daily FX-desk report (https://kbthink.com/investment/fx/daily/260904.html); the Fed's own H.10 release for that week had not published as of 2026-09-07 and BOK's basic-rate page was unreachable this pass, so this is a near-primary bank market-data source, not BOK/Fed itself — that implies ≈2,405,961 KRW per ordinary share on the SKHY tape, against the 1,647,000 KRW close already recorded for 000660.KS on the same date: a gap of +46.1%, i.e. the USD-tape SKHY print implies a materially richer ordinary-share value than the KRX print the same day (likely thin-liquidity/arbitrage dislocation in a newly-listed ADS rather than a reconciled cross-rate). The rule stands regardless: the call was made on 000660.KS at 2,215,000 KRW (the 2026-06-09 publish-date close) and that entry price does not change; SKHY is a tape reference only, never a substitute entry or exit price for this call.
source: docs/plans/markets-work-catalogue-2026-09-07.md
