Markets
Kioxia Sank 16% as SK Hynix and the Kospi Rose
Kioxia fell about 16% in Tokyo on Monday after guiding to a flat December-quarter profit, while SK Hynix rose 4.5% and the Kospi 2.7%. The same memory boom got two opposite verdicts.
Two of the world's biggest memory makers traded in opposite directions on the first day of November. Kioxia Holdings, the Japanese NAND flash maker, was down about 16% at ¥11,315 in Tokyo by mid-afternoon on Monday, November 2, from ¥13,470 on Friday, after an outlook that showed its profit growth pausing. In Seoul, SK Hynix rose about 4.5% to ₩1,482,000 and Samsung Electronics about 2.2%, carrying the Kospi up roughly 2.7% to near 5,886. Japan's Nikkei 225 was flat at about 63,260.
Kioxia's numbers were not weak; its forecast was flat. Released after the close on Friday, October 30, the guidance called for operating profit of about ¥2 trillion, roughly $12.7 billion, in the December quarter, against an analyst consensus of ¥2.35 trillion and almost unchanged from the ¥1.99 trillion it earned in the September quarter. The company blamed timing rather than demand: some orders were pulled into September and others pushed to March, because enterprise storage products need longer production runs. Chief financial officer Yoshihiko Kawamura said on the call that he expects a return to rapid growth by March, that next year's planned capacity is fully booked, that more than half of 2028's is allocated and that contracts into 2029 are being negotiated. Its American depositary receipts had already fallen 17% in New York on Friday.
The scale of the drop also reflects where the stock started. Kioxia's shares had already fallen by more than half from their record high, and it is one of the Tokyo stocks with the heaviest concentration of leveraged long positions, which turns a disappointment into forced selling. Shoji Hirakawa of Tokai Tokyo Intelligence Lab told Bloomberg the outlook could heighten concerns about profitability across Japan's technology sector, and chip-equipment and materials names such as Ibiden and Sumco led the early losses.
Seoul read the same industry differently, and the data support it. Korea's trade ministry said on Sunday that October chip exports rose 259% from a year earlier to $56.4 billion, and SK Hynix, which makes the high-bandwidth DRAM used in AI accelerators, reported an operating margin of about 80% last week. DRAM for AI servers and NAND for enterprise storage share a cycle but not a schedule: one is tied to the accelerators being shipped this quarter, the other to storage orders that, on Kioxia's account, have simply moved. After a month in which the Kospi lost more than 16%, Monday's rebound also had a large short-covering component.
The split leaves a simple question for the rest of the week. If Kioxia's timing explanation is right, the December quarter will be a plateau rather than a peak, and its March-quarter guidance in early 2027 is when that shows. If it is wrong, the first sign will come from other suppliers of enterprise storage, starting with the US memory and disk makers that report in the coming weeks, and from Korea's first-ten-days export figures for November, due on November 11.