Prev
Click the blue text and follow us
✦
JUMBO SHEEN
INVESTMENT
✦
Headlines
South Korea’s semiconductor exports reached USD 56.44 billion in October, rising 259.4% year-on-year. Their share of total exports climbed from 26.4% to 49%, lifting overall exports to USD 115.28 billion (+93.7%), a record high. The upturn in the memory cycle is once again validated by trade statistics.
The Phase I industrialization project for advanced optoelectronic and silicon photonic chip devices of Accelink broke ground on November 1. Located in the Wuhan East Lake Free Trade Zone, it carries a total investment of RMB 10.2 billion, marking the start of physical construction for silicon photonics and optical chip capacity expansion.
Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Jae-yong visited the Advanced Packaging Lab (APL) in Yokohama on November 1. The company plans to invest JPY 40 billion over the next five years and expand its R&D headcount to more than 100 by 2027, extending research scope to wafer bonding and glass substrates.
Empyrean Technology plans to acquire up to a 51% stake in QuickLogic with a consideration not exceeding RMB 220 million to fill its gap in EDA for digital logic optimization. Shanghai is directing its first tape-out subsidy policy for integrated circuits toward eligible small and medium-sized enterprises.
Independent third-party testing on Iluvatar’s Tianhai 300 shows its end-to-end inference throughput per card hits 1.05 times that of the H200. For the IXL144 super-node, the cost per million valid tokens is roughly 40% lower than mainstream international alternatives.
In-depth Analysis
Optical Communications & Optical Chips: Phase I of Accelink’s project covers a land area of approximately 35,000 square meters with a planned construction area of 166,300 square meters. It will feature high-grade cleanrooms and an intelligent warehousing and logistics center, aimed at boosting the scaled delivery capacity of silicon photonic chips and high-end optoelectronic devices. Structural shifts merit attention: H3C Group disclosed that its UniPoDS81000X1 super-node supports 40 domestic accelerator cards within a single Scale-Up domain and adopts an “all-electrical interconnection without optical modules” design. Intra-rack copper interconnection creates marginal substitution for short-reach optical modules; nevertheless, Scale-Out and cross-rack interconnection still rely on 800G/1.6T and CPO, so the core demand driver for optical modules remains intact.
Advanced Packaging & Testing: Samsung positions the Yokohama APL as its global advanced packaging R&D hub, focusing on next-generation packaging materials and processes, and expanding research into wafer bonding and glass substrates. This reflects leading memory and foundry players’ proactive deployment of hybrid bonding and glass substrate technologies. No new announcements from domestic packaging and testing firms today. Price hikes for CoWoS and supply constraints on substrates continue to propagate down the supply chain.
SiC & Power Semiconductors: No major updates today. Earlier news on Infineon’s 300 mm GaN site (approximately EUR 1.1 billion, scheduled for launch at end‑2027) and the doubling of Yangjie Technology’s SiC revenue were covered in prior briefings. The sector currently lacks fresh catalysts; pricing and lead times remain key monitoring metrics.
Memory & Compute Chips: South Korea’s semiconductor exports in October accounted for nearly half of its total exports, confirming the volume-price upcycle for HBM/DRAM. Sam Altman of OpenAI noted that “a large amount of DRAM is fitted in PCs but underutilized”, implying a mismatch between end-side memory configurations and the actual workloads of AI inference. On the domestic computing front, Iluvatar’s Tianhai 300 delivers 1.05× the H200’s performance on 64K context attention, 1.15× MoE throughput, and 10%–30% lower first-token latency for Agent workloads. In 8-card FP8 training, per-card throughput reaches 1.33× that of the H100 with a step time jitter of 0.43%. GPU+XPU heterogeneous AFD decoupling cuts decoding latency by 60%.
Equipment & Materials: No major new developments today. ProPlus Electronics posted an 84.45% year-on-year revenue increase in Q3 with steady progress in its EDA business. Together with Empyrean Technology’s acquisition, this forms a development pattern combining organic growth and external expansion.
Policy & Macro: Shanghai issued the Action Plan for Promoting High-Quality Development of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises. It specifies that the first tape-out subsidy policy for integrated circuits will favor qualified SMEs, while optimizing computing power vouchers, model vouchers (token vouchers), and corpus vouchers, and strengthening municipal-level intelligent computing orchestration. This benefits small and mid-sized IC design houses and local tape-out demand. The A-share Q3 earnings season has concluded, and the AI computing chain (chips, memory, optical modules, PCBs) has emerged as the main direction for profit migration.
Daily Investment Tips
1. The divergence between memory fundamentals and share prices is widening: the PHLX Semiconductor Index fell 7.2% in October. Western Digital’s results beat expectations yet its stock still dropped more than 8% in a single trading day. South Korea’s export growth coexists with channel inventory build-up and liquidity pressure; position risks in highly-valued segments warrant caution.
2. Domestic computing power and silicon photonics capacity expansion represent structural tracks with relatively high certainty. That said, the technical route of “intra-rack copper interconnect replacing short-reach optical links” deserves continuous monitoring, as it may alter assumptions on the per-unit value of optical modules.
3. SiC / power semiconductors lack near-term catalysts. Subsequent price hike announcements or stronger-than-expected automotive-grade orders would be required to mark an inflection point.
Jumbo Sheen FundDisclaimer:The content involved in this article is for sharing and exchange purposes only, and shall not be construed as investment advice. It is provided merely for readers' reference. All copyrights of the quoted content belong to the original authors. If any infringement is found, please contact us for removal.
