Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, South Korea’s two memory chip giants, just had their worst week on the stock market since the 2008 financial crisis, The Korea Herald reports. From Monday, October 12th, to Friday, October 16th, Samsung shares fell 17.8% and SK hynix shares 24.3%.
Samsung’s drop was its sharpest since the fourth week of October 2008, when it lost 19.3%. SK hynix did worse: its steepest since the third week of November 2008, when it fell 31.9%.
Foreign investors dumped a net 11.21 trillion won (about $8.4 billion or Php 529 billion) of Kospi stocks that week, and Samsung and SK hynix made up 78.8% of it. Both companies have strong earnings, the Herald notes, but investors are worried about US interest rates, whether the huge spending on AI will pay off, and China.
ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China’s largest DRAM maker, plans to bring a denser memory cell design, called 4F-squared, to next-generation server memory by the end of 2026. It hasn’t shown it can mass-produce the design economically, or shared specs and yields, the Herald adds.
China’s DRAM maker is already cashing in on the shortage. Its preliminary filing forecasts revenue of 265 billion to 270 billion yuan (about $39.5 billion to $40.3 billion, or Php 2.49 trillion to 2.54 trillion) for the first nine months of 2026, more than eight times the same period last year. Net profit comes to 131 billion to 132.5 billion yuan (about $19.5 billion to $19.8 billion, or Php 1.23 trillion to 1.25 trillion), up from a loss of 5.28 billion yuan (about $790 million or Php 50 billion) a year earlier.
The company credits demand for AI computing, which has grown fast since the second half of 2025, leaving DRAM in short supply and prices sharply higher. It’s the same crunch we called the RAMpocalypse, and the one Apple CEO John Ternus calls a crisis.
So Korea’s two memory giants just had their worst week in 18 years in the middle of a DRAM boom, while their Chinese rival keeps about half its revenue as profit. By Friday, foreign investors owned 45.98% of Samsung, the lowest since July 2009, and 48.85% of SK hynix, the lowest since December 2021.
Bottom line: gadgets with any form of memory in them will continue to be expensive for months, maybe even years to come.
