Just very helpful timelines reiterated around glass substrate (source: Trendforce):
- SKC Absolics (011790) H2 2026 (first mover x $AMAT) - $AMD customers
- Samsung electromechanics h2 2027 (009150) x Sumitomo Chem (4005) - Apple / $AVGO / hyperscalers
Idk about $INTC 2030 reports, we’ll see.
$TSM CoPoS was 2-3Y was correct though from recent TSM chairman comments. Innolux was interesting beneficiary. $SHMD should be too off TSM but financials were pretty toxic.
Same players should appear multiple times, eg innolux + SKC.
Also applies to $LPK and upstream equipment seller around these ramps.
What's happening in the MLCC market
First off, MLCC as a whole is a $15B market. MLCCs for servers were a $1.3B market in 2025 ($600m for AI servers, $700m for general servers)
The AI server MLCC market is growing at 80%+ CAGR, and the general server MLCC market will also accelerate due to agentic AI increasing CPU demand (around 30%-40% CAGR)
We will see negative growth in the smartphone/mobile MLCC market for at least 2026-27.
Humanoids are another future high-growth market for MLCCs
Book-to-bill ratio for most MLCC suppliers is over 1 now
Reasons for price hikes-
High Nickel & Silver are affecting all segments
There is a supply-demand mismatch in the high-end (high capacitance, high voltage) segment, which is used in autos & servers
High-end MLCC lead time is over 20 weeks
Spot/distributor prices have increased by 20%-40% for low capacitance & consumer device MLCCs due to hoarding and double booking, especially in China
OEM contracts have not seen large price hikes yet
What's happening now:
Rapid capacity expansion happening across the industry
Murata expects blended ASP prices to remain flat (ASP going down in consumer electronics, expansion in AI server market)
Tier 1 players like Murata, Taiyo Yuden, SEMCO building capacity to serve AI server MLCC market
This will create opportunities for Tier 2/3 and Chinese suppliers to expand in the mid to low end market (Macronix effect)
Future:
MLCC production equiment & raw materials suppliers will be the biggest beneficiary of this CAPEX boom
MLCC producer stocks have performed well, and it is finally spilling to raw material/equipment producers
I expect them to outperform MLCC producers now
⚡️U.S. outperformance is real, durable, and more structurally important than most people want to admit.
America is winning because it can metabolize chaos faster than everyone else.
That is the whole secret.
Europe is optimized for preservation.
America is optimized for mutation.
Europe protects the existing social model. America lets capital, talent, fraud, ambition, violence, speculation, startups, monopolies, bubbles, immigrants, engineers, universities, military spending, energy production, and financial markets collide until something enormous breaks through.
That produces ugliness. It also produces scale.
The U.S. can create OpenAI, Nvidia, SpaceX, Tesla, Palantir, Anduril, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, BlackRock, shale, Bitcoin infrastructure, venture capital networks, and world-dominating financial markets in the same civilizational machine. Europe can produce excellent engineers, beautiful cities, strong welfare states, industrial champions, and high living standards. But it struggles to create world-eating firms in the new layers of power.
That is the gap.
The Economist is late because this was visible years ago. The 2020s did not create U.S. dominance. They exposed the compounding. AI, cloud, energy, defense tech, capital markets, reserve currency privilege, fiscal capacity, demographic absorption, and China’s slowdown all pushed the world’s marginal capital back toward America.
The biggest structural advantage is the dollar. The U.S. issues the asset the world needs in crisis, then uses that privilege to finance deficits, defense, liquidity, innovation, and consumption. Everyone complains about U.S. excess. Then they buy U.S. assets when the world gets dangerous.
That is empire mechanics.
Europe’s problem is deeper than weak growth. It has lost speed. Too much regulation, too little risk, aging populations, expensive energy, fragmented capital markets, weak tech platforms, defense dependence, demographic tension, and political systems designed to block extremes rather than produce new engines. Europe is not dead. But it is increasingly downstream of American tech, American defense, American liquidity, and American risk appetite.
America’s contradiction is brutal: the system is globally dominant while many households feel poorer, angrier, and less secure.
That is why people miss the signal. They look at broken housing, debt, health care, crime anxiety, inflation, political dysfunction, and conclude America is failing. At the household layer, many things are degrading. At the system-power layer, America is pulling further ahead.
Both are true.
Markets care more about the system-power layer until social breakdown starts impairing earnings, labor, politics, or bond confidence.
So the real investment implication is clear: U.S. assets keep attracting global capital because the U.S. still owns the future-facing engines. AI, defense, energy, software, capital markets, and hard-asset monetary escape routes remain American-centered.
Europe can rally cyclically.
America owns the structural premium.
• MicroLED → “most overhyped” right now; calls it “a hoax” with seven objectively better alternatives.
• onsemi → skeptical on their vertical GaN claims (“just slides, no data sheets, no actual specs”).
• MatX → doesn’t have enough information; “maybe it’s good, but I don’t know anything about them.”
• Bloom Energy → notes traditional energy investors are short it (thinking it’s too expensive vs. natural gas), but he explains why that’s misguided given AI power constraints.
Neutral / not enough info / no strong opinion:
• Terafab, Amkor, Ibiden, Unimicron, Fujikura, Besi, Camtek, Onto (he prefers Rigaku over them), etc.
He also notes the overall AI supply chain is constrained across everything (memory, indium phosphide, logic, power, etc.), with memory and indium phosphide having worsened in the last 6 months
Here’s a comprehensive, deduplicated list in roughly the order they appear (focusing on named companies/startups; generic references like “hyperscalers,” “memory makers,” or “fabs” are excluded unless a specific name is given):
• Accelerator / AI chip companies: Positron, Cerebras, MatX, Taalas
• Fabs / foundries: TSMC, Intel, Samsung
• Memory / DRAM / HBM: Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron
• Indium phosphide / optics / lasers supply chain: Lumentum, Coherent, Sumitomo, AXT, IQE, Aixtron (AIXTRON)
• Power semiconductors: Texas Instruments (TI), Navitas, onsemi, Infineon, Wolfspeed
• Solid-state transformer / power delivery players: SolarEdge, Enphase Energy, Delta Electronics, Vertiv, Eaton
• Neocloud / cloud providers: CoreWeave, Oracle, Nebius
• Other / packaging / semicap / networking: Terafab, Amkor, Ibiden, Unimicron, Nokia, Infinera, Ciena, Besi, Rigaku, Camtek, Onto Innovation (Onto), Tower Semiconductor (Tower Semi), Semtech, MACOM, Fujikura, GE Vernova, Bloom Energy (Bloom), Arista (XPO reference)
(Nvidia is referenced in passing for products like Rubin, but not analyzed as an investment.)
Irrational Analysis’s expressed views (“he” in the interview)
He gives direct opinions on several names (positive, negative, or neutral/caveated). Here’s the breakdown based on what he says explicitly:
Bullish / very positive / “big fan” / owns or most excited about:
• Positron and Cerebras → “very big fan” for inference (among the top alternatives for training/inference in 3–5 years). On Cerebras specifically: loves the company overall, is buying shares, calls it a stock he wants to be “an activist investor” in, but has pointed criticisms (FP16 instead of FP4, IO/KV cache issues, packaging yields). Still net bullish and wants it to improve.
• Lumentum (preferred way to play indium phosphide shortage) + broader indium phosphide chain (AIXTRON, AXT, etc.).
• Wolfspeed → very interesting / high-conviction power semis play; sees 5× upside potential if utilization rebounds (vertically integrated, overbuilt capacity, new 10kV SiC part looks strong for infrastructure/solid-state transformers outside the data center).
• GE Vernova → owns a lot of shares; calls it a “high-quality moat” in gas turbines; “never selling.”
• Rigaku → his “most exciting” name in the long-only book (X-ray inspection for advanced packaging moving from R&D to production).
• Semtech → “most exciting” in his trading account; duopoly with MACOM but Semtech parts are superior; works across copper, PCBs, linear pluggable optics, transceivers, near-package optics, etc.; “has a lot more room to run.”
• Nokia (and to some extent Infinera) → likes as a reasonable-value play / cheaper alternative to Ciena.
• Power semis broadly (TI and Navitas tied for #1 in GaN; power delivery outside the data center is “arguably more interesting” than inside).
• Memory makers (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) → all will sell everything they make at high margins due to severe shortages; differences are “frankly dumb” to over-focus on.
• Logic fabs broadly (TSMC, Intel, Samsung) → situation is bad but has improved somewhat.
He also likes the engineering/economics of Taalas (if the premise works) and calls the indium phosphide shortage “insane” / “really, really bad” (bullish for the supply-chain names above).
Not bullish / skeptical / bearish:
• Taalas → engineering is “super, super clever” and economics could be “amazing” / “incredible performance at dirt cheap prices,” but he does not believe in the premise (fixed/hard-coded weights + limited fine-tuning via LoRA). Thinks AI companies won’t tolerate the constraint of mostly static weights given how fast models change. He “shills them a little bit” only because the tech is cool.
• Neoclouds (CoreWeave and smaller ones especially) → “kind of” still bearish; “bad business”; smaller ones most likely to struggle or “die” when debt/interest rates bite or shortages raise costs.
[한국 주식 주도주 정리 - $IBKR 외국인 친구들을 위한 가이드 🇰🇷]
1. 반도체
$MU 가 PER 20배 넘어가는데 SK하이닉스($000660.KS) 아직 12배? 13배정도 되었나 이제?
같은 HBM 칩 만드는데 우편번호만 다름.
Korean = NO.1 반도체. 그냥 사면 됨.
- SK하이닉스 $000660.KS - HBM 세계 1위, 엔비디아 최대 공급사. 설��� 끝.
- 삼성전자 $005930.KS - 폰+칩+가전을 $MU 밸류에이션으로 살 수 있음. 이게 말이 됨?
- SK스퀘어 $402340.KS - SK하이닉스 지분 들고 있는 지주사. 하이닉스 고베타픽. 할인된 가격에 하이닉스 사는 느낌.
소형잡주도 좀 적어보자면
- 파두 $440110.KQ - SSD 컨트롤러 만드는데 스페이스X 공급망에 엮여있음. 소형주 로켓.
- 인텍플러스 $064290.KQ - 반도체 외관검사 장비. 인텔 공급망 노출. 곡괭이 삽 플레이.
2. 금융주
$IBKR 이 한국 주식을 전 세계에 열어줬음.
그 통행료 받는 게 누구냐? 한국 증권사들임. $IBKR 이 얘네 대신 돈 벌어주는 구조.
- 삼성증권 $016360.KS - $IBKR 유일한 공식 중개 브로커. 독점임. 끝.
- 유안타증권 $003470.KS - 그 다음 IBKR 수혜주. 대만계 모회사라 글로벌 브릿지.
- 미래에셋증권 $006800.KS - 스페이스X 지분 직접 투자까지 함. 호재 덩어리.
- 키움증권 $039490.KS - 한국 개인투자자 거래량 1위. 한국판 로빈후드인데 수익은 진짜 남.(토스증권이 찐이긴하지만...비상장)
- 추가로 4대 금융지주(KB금융 $105560.KS, 신한지주 $055550.KS, 하나금융지주 $086790.KS, 우리금융지주 $316140.KS, 메리츠금융지주 $138040.KS)도 밸류업 정책 수혜로 결국 좋은 소식 올 것 같음.
3. 광통신
$CPO $LITE $CIEN 좋아하는 너네들 들어봐.
걔네 공급망에 한국 애들이 엮여있는데 아직 아무도 모름.
- 대한광통신 $010170.KQ - 이름이 직관적. Korea Fiber Optics. 더 설명 필요함?
- 오이솔루션 $138080.KQ - OI = Optical Interconnect. 한국어로 읽으면 오이(���)임.
- RF머트리얼즈 $327260.KQ - RF/광학 소재 만드는 회사. 재료 파는 쪽이라 마진 좋음.
4. 유리기판
AI 칩이 고도화될수록 실리콘 기판이 한계에 부딪힘.
유리기판이 그 다음 세대인데 한국이 이걸 먼저 잡았음.
코스닥이 이미 난리났고 우리는 아직 초입임.
- SKC $011790.KS - 한국 유리기판 대장주. 이 섹터 얘기할 때 빠지면 안 됨.
- 필옵틱스 $161580.KQ - 유리기판 가공 장비. 삼성 DS 부문이랑 합동 제안서 낸 사이.
- 켐트로닉스 $357780.KQ - 유리 인터포저 소재. 필옵틱스랑 세트로 묶어서 보면 됨.
- 기가비스 $420770.KQ - 유리기판 검사 장비. 칩 하나 만들 때마다 얘 매출 나옴.
5. 반도체 소부장 (소재·부품·장비)
- 한국 소부장 = 아무도 얘기 안 하는 Tier-1 공급사들.
K-반도체 골드러시의 곡괭이랑 삽 파는 애들.
- 테스 $095610.KQ - PECVD/CVD 장비. 삼성전자·SK하이닉스랑 ��세대 장비 공동개발 중.
- ISC $095340.KQ - 반도체 테스트 소켓. 칩 만들면 무조건 테스트해야 함. 반복 매출 구조.
6. 지주사 플레이 (밸류업)
한국 정부가 지금 상장사들한테 자사주 소각하고 주주환원 하라고 드라이브 엄청 걸고 있음.
지주사들 NAV 대비 40~60% 할인된 채로 거래되는 애들 많음. 정책이 먹히면 그냥 공짜 수익임.
반도체 + 지주사 1타2피 픽:
- 두산 $000150.KS - 지주사인데 반도체/에너지 사업 리스트럭처링 중. 가치 unlock 기대.
- LS $006260.KS - 지주사인데 LS일렉트릭(전력 인프라) + 소재 사업까지 엮임. 요즘 핫.
전통 지주사 밸류업 후보:
- SK Inc. $034730.KS
- 한화 $000880.KS
- CJ $001040.KS
이정도? 요새 코스피가 난리인데, 한국 주식시장이 외국형들한테 열리는것 같아서 좋은 기회라 생각해서 정리해봤어.
한국 시장에 대해서 관심 있거나 궁금한 주식, 정보, 기업 등 있���면 팔로우 하고 소통하자구.
웰컴 😍