A 板块｜现金流创纪录，股价照样往下掉

Three companies are expected to surpass an astonishing $200bn of free cashflow apiece next year. One is Nvidia, an American darling that designs the advanced processors needed to run artificial-intelligence models. The other two are Samsung and SK Hynix, a pair of South Korean outfits that dominate the market for the more mundane memory chips in phones, laptops and, increasingly, data centres. Their windfall represents one of the greatest cross-border transfers of cash in corporate history.

Now a nation newly enamoured of stock markets is discovering that shares can go down as well as up. Since peaking in June the stock prices of Samsung and SK Hynix have crashed by 41% and 52%, respectively, wiping $1.2trn from South Korea's highly concentrated stock market. Those of SK Hynix fell by more than a fifth this week as investors digested a mere six-fold increase in its quarterly operating profit, compared with the year before. Samsung's shares have not been this volatile since the dotcom era.

B 板块｜供给会追上来，长期承诺也可能松动

The trillion-dollar question for investors in South Korea is when the price of memory will peak. Bulls argue that data-centre construction and robotics mean demand for memory will outstrip supply into the 2030s. But the increasingly common view is that the same thing will happen to memory chips as has happened to every commodity in every commodity cycle in history—that new supply will, within a year or two, cause prices and profits to fall. Despite their vertiginous rise, Samsung and SK Hynix have on average traded only at single-digit multiples of forward earnings during the past year, suggesting that investors think their profits are at or near their highest point.

Second is the risk that supposedly ironclad spending commitments from customers turn out to be no such thing. Both South Korean firms have made much of their “long-term agreements” with buyers, arguing that pre-payment and price certainty gives them visibility on profits for years to come. Yet judicious investors have begun to fear that customers will find ways of wriggling out when it is advantageous for them to do so. Investors also worry how ironclad lease agreements for data centres would prove if model-makers tried to get out of them in a bust. The piles of debt tied to Meta's giant off-balance-sheet data centre have drawn particular scrutiny.