BlockBeats News, August 7th, Goldman Sachs Asia Seoul Branch trader Justin Park reported today, pointing out that the recent intense volatility in the South Korean stock market has pushed the outlook for the memory chip industry fundamentals to an overly pessimistic level. The market pricing implies a fundamental pessimism that "exceeds the actual situation," and the strength and duration of the memory cycle may surpass previous ones.

Goldman Sachs maintains its overweight position on the South Korean market and keeps its KOSPI 12-month target at 12,000 points unchanged. The South Korean KOSPI index plummeted 39% after its peak on June 22nd, and on July 31st, it surged 17.9% in a single day, marking the largest single-day gain in history. Goldman Sachs believes that the KOSPI's sharp decline in this round is not a substantial deterioration of fundamentals but rather triggered by concerns about the sustainability of the memory cycle, with leveraged ETF passive selling and short-term momentum investors selling off significantly exacerbating the situation. The technical outlook has significantly improved—leveraged ETF size contraction, decreased margin exposure, tighter regulations, and hedge fund position reduction have cleaned up the market's chip structure, laying the foundation for subsequent recovery.

Goldman Sachs refutes the three core concerns of the short sellers point by point.

Concern 1: NVIDIA plans to downgrade the HBM configuration of Rubin Ultra. Goldman Sachs interprets this in the opposite way—this precisely confirms the structural bottleneck of HBM supply. HBM has become the most scarce core component in the AI industry chain, and its availability will be a key limiting factor for the global AI industry's expansion.

Concern 2: SK Hynix's LTA strategy opportunity cost. A large amount of capacity is tied to old HBM3E production lines, causing SK Hynix's DRAM market share to drop to 26% in the second quarter, with Samsung returning to the top at 39%, and the gap between Micron and SK Hynix narrowing to just 1 percentage point. Goldman Sachs believes that SK Hynix's next-phase competitiveness depends on its ability to quickly complete the production line switch.

Concern 3: The narrative of NAND's "better than expected but below market expectations" triggered profit-taking, with consumer and edge computing business declining significantly by 32% QoQ, with management expecting substantial recovery only by 2027. Goldman Sachs' structural judgment is that the DRAM process miniaturization space is approaching saturation—10 nanometers may be the last node, and the decline in yields and a significant increase in capital spending will structurally support a positive outlook for the memory cycle.

There are two positive signals on the storage demand side: ChangXin Storage has refused Apple's price reduction request, pricing on par with Samsung and SK Hynix; DeepSeek is planning a "significant" price hike, signaling the end of the era of ultra-low-priced subsidized AI inference.