Samsung Electronics Co Ltd

Foreign investors have withdrawn $131 billion from South Korean equities this year, the largest outflow among major Asian markets, as enthusiasm for artificial intelligence-related investments fades. Trading turnover in South Korea's $4.3 trillion equity market has plunged 70% from its late-May peak, while the benchmark Kospi has fallen 22% in the second half of 2026, according to Bloomberg. The reversal follows a first-half rally that made the Kospi the world's best-performing major equity benchmark, driven largely by demand for AI memory chips. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which together account for more than half the index's weighting, have become a source of vulnerability, and Samsung shares declined Thursday despite the company reporting a nearly ninefold increase in quarterly operating profit. Market support from corporate share repurchases is also weakening, with Samsung and SK Hynix approaching completion of combined buyback programmes worth 55 trillion won, or $41 billion, while outstanding margin loans have fallen to approximately 33 trillion won from a June peak of 38.6 trillion won and brokerage deposits have dropped to around 100 trillion won from nearly 140 trillion won. Investors are increasingly favouring Taiwan, whose Taiex has gained 70% this year and outperformed the Kospi by approximately 23 percentage points last quarter, with UBS Global Wealth Management saying it prefers Taiwan equities for tactical AI exposure.

Video game console sales have fallen to their lowest August level in 13 years, with the memory shortage continuing to weigh on consumer prices. Dan Howley, Yahoo Finance Technology Editor, said a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series S or Series X bought in 2020 or 2021 is now worth more than its original price, with consoles going for $150 to $200 above their initial launch price. He attributed the increases to President Trump's tariffs last year and to the data center build out, which has made storage chips and memory chips harder to come by and more expensive, costs that companies like Apple, Samsung, HP and Dell pass on to consumers. Nintendo raised the price of its original Switch, which came out in 2017, and also raised the price of its Switch 2 by $50 when President Trump introduced tariffs on consoles made in China. Howley said the hope is that Grand Theft Auto VI, which launches in November, will lift console demand, noting that GTA 5 had made $6 billion as of a few years ago and that developers have moved their games earlier or into 2027 to avoid its blast radius.

Taiwan's stock market is emerging as a more compelling choice than South Korea's for investors looking to ride the artificial intelligence wave in the final stretch of 2026, after growth in the AI industry began spreading from chipmakers to other businesses across the supply chain. Taiwan's Taiex index has jumped roughly 72% since the start of 2026, the highest among more than 90 global equity indexes tracked by Bloomberg, while South Korea's KOSPI has gained about 63%, ranking second. In the third quarter, the Taiex outperformed the KOSPI by about 23 percentage points, the widest gap since the early 2000s, and earnings estimate upgrades for Taiwanese listed companies outpaced South Korea's for the first time since March 2025. Earnings estimates for companies in the Taiex were revised up by about 19% in the quarter ending in September, compared with an increase of about 15% for KOSPI companies. A Bank of America fund manager survey in September found that about 40% of respondents said they were overweight Taiwanese stocks relative to the benchmark, compared with 25% who held the same view on South Korean stocks. In the survey of 87 fund managers overseeing a combined 211 billion dollars in assets, 35% said Taiwan would be the Asian stock market to benefit most from AI going forward, while only 5% chose South Korea. A key factor is Taiwan's industrial structure, which is linked to the AI supply chain at many levels, from semiconductor design and manufacturing to chip packaging, networking systems and servers. South Korea's market, by contrast, still relies on just a few large chipmakers, particularly Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which fell between 19% and 33% in the three months ending in September after six straight quarters of gains. Societe Generale continues to favour Taiwanese stocks over South Korean ones, expecting the rise in memory chip prices to slow over the coming quarters before returning to normal in 2028 amid growing competition from Chinese producers. However, Peter Lee, a managing director at Citigroup, believes investors should start accumulating shares such as Samsung and SK Hynix, because the market may be underestimating demand for high-bandwidth memory chips, or HBM, in 2027. On valuations, Taiwan's market trades at about 18 times forward 12-month earnings estimates, above the KOSPI's roughly 5.5 times. And Taiwan's rally is not confined to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. alone. TSMC shares rose 2.9% in the quarter ending in September, their sixth straight quarterly gain, while about 10% of stocks in the Taiex have at least doubled since the start of the year, compared with just 4.1% of KOSPI stocks and 5.7% of stocks in Japan's Nikkei 225.

Goldman Sachs analyst Heather Oh warned clients that a rare convergence of three simultaneous market events on Thursday, October 8 will expose Samsung Electronics to an unusual burst of near-term volatility. The three events are Samsung's third-quarter preliminary earnings report, potential mechanical selling from semiconductor ETF rebalancing, and options expiry combined with the roll-off of the company's buyback program. Goldman estimates Samsung's third-quarter operating profit at W106 trillion, in line with street consensus of W105.5 trillion but a 5% cut from its prior estimate of W112 trillion, a revision the bank attributed primarily to Korean won strength, with the average USD/KRW rate tracking around 1,418 versus its prior assumption of 1,460. Seven semiconductor ETFs with combined assets under management of roughly W19 trillion, approximately $14 billion, are scheduled to rebalance on October 8, and local media and the street expect Samsung to face outflows due to a weighting cap in those vehicles while SK Hynix and semiconductor equipment makers absorb the offsetting inflows. Samsung's W15 trillion repurchase program was expected to be completed this week, eliminating a reliable source of daily buying support, and foreign investors were net sellers of Samsung for five consecutive days ahead of October 8, totaling net outflows of approximately $2.6 billion. Goldman maintained a constructive view on the operating fundamentals, saying it believes W100tn+ operating profit is backed by solid DRAM and NAND fundamentals with HBM growth the standout, and it expects Samsung's HBM bit shipments to grow close to 50% quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter, driven by the ramp of HBM4 shipments, while conventional DRAM bit growth is described as largely flattish given the limited level of inventory.

Google has raised the price of its seven-month-old Pixel 10a smartphone by $100 to $599 for the 128GB model, another sign of how rising memory costs are pushing up prices across the consumer electronics industry. The Pixel 10a launched in March at $499 for the 128GB model and $599 for the 256GB version, and Google's U.S. website now lists the phones at $599 and $699, respectively. The increase was first spotted on Google's online store in Japan and later appeared on its U.S. website, according to 9to5Google. The move comes amid a persistent memory-chip shortage that has pushed up costs across the consumer electronics industry, with Samsung this week raising prices on most of its Galaxy S26 smartphones by $100, while Apple raised prices on its iPhone 18 lineup and also increased prices on some older models. Google had already raised prices across its Pixel 11 lineup by $100 when it introduced the phones in August, according to Bloomberg, offsetting some of the higher starting prices by including more storage in the base configurations. The Pixel 10a had been discounted to $424 last month, and Walmart still appeared to be selling the phone for $499, although supplies were limited.

Asian chipmaking stocks fell on Monday after OpenAI paused training, evaluation and inference with tool use for its most capable models while it strengthens safety controls. South Korea's SK Hynix fell 4.8% and Samsung Electronics dropped 4.6%, while Japan's Kioxia Holdings declined 2.3%. In China, Cambricon Technologies fell 5.7%, Luxshare Precision lost 4.9%, SMIC dropped 3.6% and NAURA Technology fell 3.3%. OpenAI said its latest training pause followed a security incident involving an internal research model and that its largest planned frontier reinforcement-learning run remains on hold while safeguards are reviewed. The weakness extended across major Asian technology-heavy markets, with South Korea's KOSPI down 2.3%, China's CSI 300 down 2% and the Shanghai Composite down 1.5%, while Hong Kong's Hang Seng rose 0.7% and Japan's Nikkei 225 slipped 0.1%. Taiwan's stock market was closed Monday for the September 28 public holiday marking Confucius' Birthday and Teachers' Day, so Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and other major Taiwanese chipmakers did not trade.

Apple unveiled its first foldable smartphone, the iPhone Duo, alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup at its first major product event under CEO John Ternus, putting Siri and on-device artificial intelligence at the center of its pitch. The passport-shaped Duo opens into a 7.6-inch inner display with a 5.4-inch outer screen, runs on Apple's new A20 Pro chip, and starts at $1,999, below the more than $2,500 analysts had anticipated and roughly $100 above Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 8 at $1,899. Ternus positioned privacy as a key differentiator, describing the iPhone as an intelligent personal hub that handles AI services on-device whenever possible, with Private Cloud Compute used when cloud processing is required; Siri AI has begun rolling out in beta and will work with more than 300,000 apps at launch, though it will not initially be available in the European Union on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS, or in China pending regulatory requirements. Apple enters foldables years after Samsung, which launched its first mass-market foldable in 2019 and has released eight generations since, and the category still accounts for a single-digit share of the overall smartphone market, according to IDC's Nabila Popal, who estimated Apple's foldable could generate more than $45 billion in revenue by the end of 2027. The Duo goes on sale October 23, when investors will begin to see how consumers respond to Apple's entry into the category.

Samsung Electronics shares rose 3.25% to 285,500 won as Chinese rival CXMT began producing its fifth-generation DRAM platform, according to CXMT's announcement. CXMT has launched two 24-gigabit LPDDR5X products, giving them 50% more capacity than its previous versions, and claims its latest manufacturing process produces at least 50% more gross dies per wafer than the prior generation, though that comparison excludes final production yields. The pressure is most serious in commodity memory, where extra supply can quickly squeeze prices and margins, while Samsung's high-bandwidth memory business has greater protection because advanced packaging and customer qualification create higher barriers to entry. Samsung's GF Score of 84 out of 100 points to strong profitability, growth and financial strength, though weaker value and only moderate momentum remain visible. A downturn in conventional memory profits could limit the cash Samsung can deploy in the expensive race to lead AI memory.

Meta launched three new pairs of smart glasses at its Meta Connect conference on Wednesday, led by its first Meta VR Glasses priced at $1,299. The VR Glasses, on sale in spring 2027, are five times lighter than the Meta Quest 3 headset, feature a 5K display, and house their computing components, battery, and storage in a separate tethered puck; Meta says they are the first-ever IMAX Enhanced-certified VR device, and it is partnering with Disney+ while working to bring Amazon Prime Video and Google's YouTube to the platform, with Microsoft bringing Xbox Cloud Gaming. Meta also unveiled the $349 Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses, which drop the cameras for a lighter frame and up to 12 hours of battery life, and debuted the $449 third-generation Ray-Ban Meta glasses with longer battery life and improved microphones, alongside an updated line of its own Meta Glasses starting at $249. Meta accounted for 68.7% of global smart glasses shipments in Q2 2026, according to the International Data Corporation, but faces coming competition from Samsung and Google's Android XR glasses this fall and Snap's Specs AR glasses at $2,195, while Apple is rumored to debut its own product in late 2027.