Nanya, Winbond. Watch This Space...
While HBM is grabbing all the headlines, it will create opportunities in other places
Demand for HBM has seen the share prices for Micron & SK Hynix soar to all time record highs over the course of the past twelve months. At this point, one suspects that they may have already peaked and it’s a bit late in the game to consider investing in either. Samsung’s share price has also appreciated, but not nearly as much as their peers. This is likely due to a combination of factors, the biggest being the fact that Samsung is so much more than a leading memory manufacturer, albeit, when times are good, its memory division is the company’s cash cow. The other factor at play is the reports of problems with Samsung’s HBM product offering.
Back in February 2024, Samsung launched their HBM 3E, details here
Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has developed HBM3E 12H, the industry’s first 12-stack HBM3E DRAM and the highest-capacity HBM product to date.
Samsung’s HBM3E 12H provides an all-time high bandwidth of up to 1,280 gigabytes per second (GB/s) and an industry-leading capacity of 36 gigabytes (GB). In comparison to the 8-stack HBM3 8H, both aspects have improved by more than 50%.
“The industry’s AI service providers are increasingly requiring HBM with higher capacity, and our new HBM3E 12H product has been designed to answer that need,” said Yongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics. “This new memory solution forms part of our drive toward developing core technologies for high-stack HBM and providing technological leadership for the high-capacity HBM market in the AI era.”
So far so good but then on May 21 last, we heard that Samsung’s chip division chief was being replaced, details here.
Samsung’s achilles heel as far as its semiconductor endeavours are concerned has long been its penchant for being first to market with leading edge new technologies. While that looks great on the surface, it quite often comes with a myriad of problems hidden beneath. Their Fold smartphone and their early adoption of EUV for mass production are two examples that spring to mind.
Now, it seems that there are problems with their HBM 3E products and it remains to be seen how long it will take for these to be resolved. If you are of the opinion that these issues will be resolved in a timely manner, then Samsung’s share price will be due for a re-rating, albeit perhaps not to the extent that we have seen with Micron and SK Hynix. Personally, we think Samsung will sort out its HBM issues and ultimately enjoy a HBM market share in line with their DRAM market share, which is currently around 45%, details here.
If a play on Samsung is not your thing at this particular juncture, there’s another opportunity that’s gradually being created both by the surge in demand for HBM and the memory industry’s gradual recovery from its worst downturn in over a decade. Let’s dig in…
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