Surge of 188%! South Korea's AI exports reach new highs; after leveraged liquidation, trading returns to fundamentals!

According to the latest data from Korean Customs, exports grew by 60.4% year-on-year in the first 20 days of June, and by 49.7% year-on-year after adjusting for working days. Among these, semiconductor exports surged 188.4% year-on-year, with their share of total exports rising to nearly 40%. This marks the fifth consecutive month of triple-digit growth, reaching a new historical high. Exports of computer-related products grew 293.3% year-on-year.

This explosive growth is not merely a result of a low base effect, but is driven strongly by demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and general DRAM fueled by AI. The remarkable simultaneous surge in both volume and price confirms the ongoing boom in the global AI hardware cycle. Capital is rapidly turning into real purchase orders within core sectors such as AI servers and high-end storage, signifying a robust realization of the AI super-industry cycle in the real economy.

However, on the capital market side, the Korean stock market is undergoing a risk liquidation triggered by its high-leverage structure. On June 23, the KOSPI index plummeted by 10%, marking the largest one-day drop since March 4, once again triggering a circuit breaker. Samsung Electronics fell 12.31%, and SK Hynix dropped 12.47%, with these two chip giants accounting for 71% of the index's loss. On the same day, overseas funds had a net sell-off of more than $2.5 billion in KOSPI stocks. Meanwhile, Korean retail investors using margin financing and leverage ETF products linked to single stocks suffered heavy losses, with some leveraged products aimed at delivering twice the daily return of SK Hynix plunging more than 25% in a single day.

Export Boom is the Foundation of Market Continuation, Market Will Return to Fundamentals-Based Pricing

On one hand, the fundamentals of the AI super-cycle industry remain highly prosperous, while on the other hand, the stock market is experiencing a panic-driven sell-off. This extreme divergence between macro data and micro market movement clearly suggests that the recent crash is by no means due to a deterioration in fundamentals, but rather a purely structural clearing induced by high market leverage.

The Korean market has long been regarded as a bellwether for the global AI hardware cycle. Over the past year, continued expansion of AI capital expenditures has driven up storage chip prices, improved profit expectations, and led to a reevaluation of valuations, making the Korean stock market the strongest in the world. Additionally, with the government allowing the launch of single-stock leveraged ETFs in January, the market quickly accumulated highly crowded profit-taking and leveraged capital in a short period. This caused market valuations to far exceed fundamentals.