Institutional ticker directory tracking stock mentions, long/short ideas, and high-conviction pitches extracted from quarterly hedge fund letters.
| Ticker | Company | Sector | Industry | Pitches | Stance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fund / Manager | Thesis Excerpt | Stance | Period / Date | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Arauca Capital Jean Philippe Tissot | “SK Hynix Inc. is participating in an 800 trillion won Korean memory fab expansion, signaling a cyclical supply response that may undermine industry pricing power by 2028.” | BEAR | Q2 2026 Sep 1, 2026 | View Pitch |
Mawer International Equity Fund Mawer Investment Management Ltd. | “In emerging markets and international equity, companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, Kioxia, King Slide Works, Delta Electronics, and holding company SK Square were among the strongest contributors as demand for advanced logic, high bandwidth memory, and data center hardware surged. Within international equity, we harvested gains in SK Hynix, Kioxia, Kokusai Electric, and King Slide after a period of exceptional performance, reallocating part of the proceeds into entrenched specialists in Taiwan's server supply chain. In the U.S. we applied similar discipline by trimming Amphenol after a period of strong AI related performance and reducing Interactive Brokers Group in U.S. mid cap once its share price reached all time highs and valuation offered less margin of safety, even though the business continued to execute well. Within Canada, strong performance from banks created an opportunity to crystallize gains and reallocate, leading us to trim TD Bank and Royal Bank of Canada, and redeploy capital to names such as Onex and Intact Financial, as well as diversified financials and infrastructure businesses that offer different risk exposures. This quarter, many decisions involved trimming or exiting positions where share prices had moved well ahead of fundamentals and reallocating to areas where prospective returns are more balanced. In international equity, we exited Kone after its leveraged acquisition of German rival TKE altered the risk profile of the investment, judging that the higher financial risk and more demanding valuation no longer fit the portfolio's balance of risk and reward. We reduced SK Hynix on strength following extraordinary gains, locking in profits and managing position size.” | BULL | Q2 2026 Aug 26, 2026 | View Pitch |
Shelton Emerging Markets Fund Derek Izuel | “SK Hynix was a detractor from active return over the quarter, with the Fund's underweight position failing to keep pace with the stock's outperformance relative to the MSCI Emerging Markets Index. The South Korean chipmaker is the world's second-largest memory semiconductor manufacturer and a leading global supplier of high-bandwidth memory chips. A strategic development during the period came on June 8, when Nvidia and SK Hynix announced a multiyear technology partnership to co-develop next-generation memory for AI factories and accelerate semiconductor design and manufacturing. Under the agreement, SK Hynix will co-develop next-generation memory with Nvidia across AI servers, CPUs, AI PCs and robotics platforms. The Korean memory manufacturer returned 224.7% during the quarter amid strong high-bandwidth-memory pricing and AI-related demand. That underweight cost approximately 3% of relative performance on its own. As SK Hynix's benchmark weight and valuation increased, the Fund maintained a position below the benchmark weight, consistent with its valuation and position-sizing process.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Aug 24, 2026 | View Pitch |
Van Der Mandele Arar Fund Joost van der Mandele | “When you let your profits run there's always a bit of 'live by the sword, die by the sword' going on, as minor positions swell to 10x the size in some cases. ThereR” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Aug 18, 2026 | View Pitch |
Van Der Mandele Arar Fund Joost van der Mandele | “When you let your profits run there's always a bit of 'live by the sword, die by the sword' going on, as minor positions swell to 10x the size in s...” | BULL | Q2 2026 Aug 18, 2026 | View Pitch |
Third Point Partners Daniel S. Loeb | “SK Hynix Inc. was one of the top five winners for the quarter. Korean equities were particularly vulnerable as the KOSPI fell nearly ~40% from its peak as of July 30th. What was most interesting about this sell-off is that it seems unrelated to company/industry fundamentals, economic factors or geopolitics. Indeed, shares of many companies dropped sharply after reported earnings where they significantly 'beat and raised.' What transpired earlier in July was a confluence of deleveraging events globally, including forced selling by individual investors and institutions who owned shares in companies such as SK Hynix via 2 and 3 times leveraged ETFs and leveraged accounts.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Aug 4, 2026 | View Pitch |
Sands Capital Emerging Markets Growth Fund Teeja Boye, CFA and Brian A. Christiansen, CFA | “SK hynix contributed positively during the quarter as the memory shortage broadened beyond high-bandwidth memory (HBM) into conventional DRAM and NAND. AI inference and agentic workloads are increasing demand across the memory stack, while the industry faces physical limits on how quickly it can add supply. SK hynix described the shortage as structural, multiyear, and across products, with meaningful capacity additions difficult before the second half of 2027. SK hynix reported DRAM prices up in the mid-60 percent range sequentially and NAND prices up in the mid-70 percent range. HBM remains strategically important, but conventional DRAM and NAND are now driving a larger share of near-term earnings revisions. Tight conventional memory pricing should also strengthen future HBM negotiations, as customers compete for scarce capacity across product categories. The company ended the quarter trading at less than 10 times forward earnings, given that its investment results were driven by earnings revisions.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Jul 31, 2026 | View Pitch |
Sands Capital International Growth Fund David E. Levanson, CFA and Danielle J. Menichella, CFA | “SK hynix is one of the world's largest dedicated producers of memory chips, including dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), NAND flash memory, and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in AI servers and other computing applications. Shares rose as investors gained confidence that accelerating AI adoption is driving a sustained tightening in memory markets, supporting stronger pricing across both DRAM and NAND. First-quarter 2026 results reinforced this view. Revenue increased 198 percent year over year, while operating profit rose 405 percent, driving record profitability and industry-leading margins. While HBM remains an important growth driver, strength extended across the broader memory portfolio. Conventional DRAM pricing accelerated significantly during the quarter, while NAND pricing increased even faster, reflecting robust demand for memory and storage as AI workloads become increasingly data intensive. We raised our revenue and earnings estimates materially to reflect stronger pricing, continued supply constraints, and improving industry fundamentals. We believe SK hynix's technology leadership, deep customer relationships, and focused memory strategy position the business as a key beneficiary of growing AI infrastructure investment.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Jul 31, 2026 | View Pitch |
Sands Capital Global Growth Fund Brian A. Christiansen, David E. Levanson, Daniel Pilling | “SK hynix is the world's largest dedicated producer of memory chips. The business contributed positively during the quarter as the memory shortage broadened beyond high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, into conventional DRAM and NAND. AI inference and agentic workloads are increasing demand across the memory stack, while physical constraints limit how quickly the industry can add supply. SK hynix described the shortage as structural, multiyear, and broad-based, with meaningful capacity additions difficult before the second half of 2027. Pricing reflects the severity of the imbalance. SK hynix reported sequential DRAM price increases in the mid-60 percent range and NAND price increases in the mid-70 percent range. Industry checks suggest prices could continue rising in the second half of 2026, as AI data center demand absorbs available supply. HBM remains strategically important, but conventional DRAM and NAND are driving a larger share of near-term earnings revisions and should strengthen future HBM negotiations.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Jul 31, 2026 | View Pitch |
Sands Capital Technology Innovators Fund Michael Clarke, Thomas Trentman | “SK hynix contributed positively during the quarter, as the memory shortage broadened beyond high-bandwidth memory into conventional DRAM and NAND. AI inference and agentic workloads are increasing demand across the memory stack, while physical constraints limit how quickly the industry can add supply. SK hynix described the shortage as structural, multiyear, and broad-based across products, with meaningful capacity additions unlikely before the second half of 2027. This imbalance is already visible in pricing, with SK hynix reporting DRAM prices up in the mid-60 percent range sequentially and NAND prices up in the mid-70 percent range. In our view, the key implication is durability: high-bandwidth memory remains strategically important, but conventional DRAM and NAND are now driving a larger share of near-term earnings revisions, while tight supply across product categories should strengthen future pricing negotiations with customers competing for scarce capacity.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Jul 31, 2026 | View Pitch |
Minotaur Global Opportunities Fund Minotaur Capital Management Pty Ltd | “SK hynix's June quarter, reported 29 July, was an all-time high, surpassing the record set the quarter before: revenue of ₩79.3 trillion, up 257% on a year ago, and operating profit of ₩60.5 trillion at a 76% operating margin. Consensus wanted more, and the stock fell 9.6% on the day. SK hynix has still lost more than half its value from its 25 June peak. SK hynix's disclosed version, five-year agreements with deposits and purchase commitments but no published floor pricing, is a thinner and weaker form of the same structure. SK hynix raised its 2026 capex by half or more, guided DRAM shipments up 10% quarter-on-quarter into September, and printed an 83% gross margin against the sub-78% level that would concern us. We trimmed SK hynix in late May. At the 29 July close SK hynix trades 38% below the price at which we last trimmed it. SK hynix trades at roughly 3x 2027 consensus earnings on its Seoul listing. We kept our highest-conviction memory position at full size.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Jul 30, 2026 | View Pitch |
Baron Emerging Markets Fund Michael Kass | “South Korean semiconductor company SK hynix Inc. is the current leader in high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the specialized memory used alongside AI processors, and a leading producer of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and NAND flash memory. Shares rose during the quarter as the company provided perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the supply-constrained nature of the AI memory market. Customers have pre-booked more than three years of HBM supply, exceeding what SK hynix can currently produce, and are increasingly focused on securing supply rather than negotiating price. That pricing power drove record profitability in what is typically a seasonally weaker quarter, and management characterized the current cycle as structurally different from the boom-bust patterns of the memory industry's past. We retain conviction in SK hynix as a core long-term holding, viewing its leadership in the HBM market, its position as a key supplier to the leading AI chip maker, and favorable industry supply-demand dynamics as durable advantages that support multi-year earnings power.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Jul 30, 2026 | View Pitch |
AGT Partners Greg | “We have invested in SK Hynix on your behalf since early 4Q25, driven by factors such as: high barriers (technological and capital related) to entry, rising importance of memory such as High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) in an Inferencing and Agentic AI era, a semiconductor chips manufacturing structure where supply takes years to expand meaningfully, increased earnings stability due to longer-term customer contracts, improving capital discipline, and a cheap valuation during the time of purchase. In recent months, we have observed what we view as clear signs of speculative excess in parts of the Korean equity market. SK Hynix's share price rose nearly 5x from approximately ₩650,000 at the beginning of this year to a peak of nearly ₩3 million in June, before retreating by about 40% to around ₩1.8 million at the time of writing. On 27th May, the Korean Exchange allowed the listing of multiple leveraged ETFs linked to major Korean semiconductor names such as SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, with some products offering 2x–3x exposure. We are of course highly dismissive of such activity. In our view, encouraging the public to take leveraged, short-term bets on already volatile stocks serves little useful purpose. It does not improve capital allocation, strengthen businesses, or help investors build long-term wealth. More often, such products merely turn the stock market into a casino-like venue, where the most predictable beneficiaries are brokerages, product issuers, and intermediaries collecting fees, while the eventual losses are borne by retail participants seduced by the promise of fast, easy profits. This is certainly not investing as we understand it. It is pure speculation, nearing the edge of outright gambling. We certainly have no interest in participating in such behaviour. What public good can come from encouraging gambling behaviour in the stock market? Very little, in our opinion. The stock market should be a venue for allocating capital to productive businesses, not a mechanism for amplifying retail speculation. Throughout this roller-coaster ride in SK Hynix's share price, we have not done much other than make modest opportunistic additions whenever prices corrected sharply. We did not chase the stock during periods of speculative strength, nor did we panic during the subsequent drawdown. Our position size remains anchored by our assessment of long-term fundamentals, industry developments and valuation, not by short-term price action. We also want to mention on the aggressive pricing behaviour of the three major memory-chip makers. Both DRAM and NAND prices have risen relentlessly for many consecutive quarters, with some price increases reportedly near 70% in a single adjustment. This has resulted in very strong profitability for memory-chip producers and share prices have of course risen sharply correspondingly. Initially, there was limited pushback from major customers, partly because memory chips prices were recovering from a very depressed base following the 2022-2023 downturn. However, as prices continued to surge without concrete signs of moderating, resistance has started to emerge. Large customers such as Apple, and government bodies (Office of US trade representative (USTR) is exploring broad ranging tariffs on Korean semiconductors), are increasingly unwilling to allow memory suppliers to capture all the excess profits without challenge. This pace of price increase is clearly unsustainable. To be fair, aggressive pricing during upcycles has always been part of the normal memory-cycle playbook: under-supply leads to rising ASPs, profits surge, producers expand capacity, and eventually the cycle turns. Our hope is that this time, things will evolve differently. What we would much prefer to see is more sustainable value creation for all parties: slower and more measured price increases, greater emphasis on customers' long-term interests, and more long-term contracting arrangements that improve visibility for both suppliers and buyers. If the industry can move in this direction, memory companies may gradually deserve higher-quality earnings multiple. If not, the current profitability surge risks being viewed once again as just another cyclical peak. Due to the concerns discussed above, we are currently reluctant to increase our exposure to this holding and are content to keep it at a single-digit percentage of the portfolio, unless and until the facts change.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Jul 29, 2026 | View Pitch |
Stewart Investors Portfolio Manager | “SK Hynix is a leading semiconductor company in Korea. It has a solid position in the DRAM and NAND memory markets, but more importantly, it is the leader in High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) that is now being optimised for AI use. While traditional DRAM and NAND memory has become commoditised and commands little pricing power, HBM is built around annual contracts, long lead times, and high capital intensity. Customers like NVIDIA must commit to volumes well in advance, and vendors must make investment decisions based on those commitments. This order-based model introduces more predictability and customer stickiness (though it also increases execution risk and dependence on a few large buyers). Thanks to its early and consistent investment in HBM technology, the company is a first mover in this space. It also holds a solid position in the DRAM and NAND memory markets, with commodity memory providing a large proportion of recent revenues due to supply constraints. Although the cyclical element in these revenues is worth monitoring, the duopolistic industry structure should ensure decent margins and profitability over the cycle (as we have seen in the past), and barriers to entry continue to grow, along with pricing power. Additionally, corporate governance appears to be improving. The company benefited from the rising demand for HBM and elevated pricing in conventional NAND and DRAM memory, where supply has become limited. Hynix announced a capacity expansion spanning multiple sites and a partnership with US chip designer Nvidia to co-develop memory for AI supercomputers and robotics platforms. Given that a meaningful proportion of Hynix's recent earnings growth comes from the cyclically high prices for conventional memory, we have been controlling the size of our position in the company.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Jul 28, 2026 | View Pitch |
Platinum Asia Fund Cameron Robertson | “Our memory holdings, SK hynix and Samsung Electronics, have been clear beneficiaries of this trend. SK hynix's most recent quarterly results saw revenue grow 60% versus the prior quarter (+198% year on year, with net profit +398%). The uplift was largely driven by price increases. The company now keeps 72 cents in every dollar of sales as operating profit – a stark contrast to the losses they suffered as recently as 2023. This turn in fortunes has led to a 20-fold increase in the share price over the past three years. As shareholders, we have benefited handsomely from this. Yet current levels of profitability are unusually high and will not be sustained over the long term. While there is much to like about the business, it remains a commodity-like product, one where AI driven demand is outstripping supply. For SK hynix, we have sold 90% of our stake from three years ago and reinvested that money elsewhere.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Jul 25, 2026 | View Pitch |
Baillie Gifford -Emerging Markets Andrew Stobart / Mike Gush / Ben Durrant | “We initiated our holding in SK Hynix before OpenAI announced ChatGPT to an unsuspecting world. SK Hynix also delivered strong first-quarter 2026 results, with revenue of KRW52.6tn, up 198 percent year-over-year and operating profit of KRW37.6tn, up 405 percent year-over-year, driven by memory undersupply, strong shipment growth and sharp increases in DRAM and NAND prices. Profitability is expected to remain exceptionally high, supported by leading DRAM margins, a strong NAND recovery from layer technology migration and rising demand for enterprise SSDs linked to AI datacentre investment. The company remains a leader in HBM, with an estimated 50-60 percent market share, HBM4 production ramping in the second half of 2026 and early HBM4E samples already shipped to major customers. SK Hynix is also expanding capacity through major investments in Yongin, Cheongju and Indiana, while bringing key infrastructure planning forward to meet AI-driven demand. As with Samsung, ongoing supply constraints, limited cleanroom availability and longer-term agreements with cloud customers should support pricing power, cash flow visibility and elevated profitability for some time.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Jul 23, 2026 | View Pitch |
Baillie Gifford -International Concentrated Growth Lawrence Burns / Paulina McPadden | “We added three new holdings to the portfolio during the quarter: SK Hynix, Lonza and CATL. Each business provides substantial long-term opportunities in its respective fields: AI infrastructure, biologic drug manufacturing and battery technology. SK Hynix strengthens the portfolio's exposure to AI infrastructure through its leadership in high-bandwidth memory (HBM). As AI models have grown, the constraint on performance has shifted: the most advanced processors are limited less by how fast they can calculate than by how fast data can be fed to them, and they now spend much of their time idle, waiting on memory. That bottleneck is intensifying as AI begins to run as agents that work over long, multi-step tasks and ever-larger context windows, which force far more data to be held in memory at once. High-bandwidth memory is what relieves the constraint, and SK Hynix has built a clear lead in it, becoming a strategic supplier to the companies building the most advanced AI systems. Memory has historically been a commodity, and brutally cyclical. HBM will remain cyclical, but it is a different kind of memory product: technically demanding, engineered and qualified in close partnership with each customer, and in short supply relative to demand. This is best reflected in the emergence of favourable long-term agreements with key customers scrambling to secure supply.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Jul 23, 2026 | View Pitch |
INN8 Albert Louw | “SK Hynix is a South Korean multinational semiconductor company and a pioneer in the AI hardware ecosystem. SK Hynix is the primary supplier of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) to tech giants like Nvidia, who's GPUs cannot function effectively without HBM memory chips stacked alongside them. Therefore, Nvidia is a major client and partner for those HBM products supplied by SK Hynix and their direct competitors – Samsung and Micron. Though SK Hynix still has an edge in that market, Micron have raced to catch up in recent years. Micron and SK Hynix made back-to-back announcements of late that solidify the memory chip market as the hottest part of the AI industry. Micron delivered sales and profit forecasts that shattered analyst estimates, while SK Hynix disclosed plans for a blockbuster listing in the US.” | NEUTRAL | Q2 2026 Jul 17, 2026 | View Pitch |
Baillie Gifford Tim Campbell | “SK Hynix achieved remarkable Q1 2026 results with revenues surging 198% due to tight memory supplies and soaring pricing. Holding a dominant 50-60% share of the HBM market, the company's aggressive capacity expansions and long-term cloud commitments secure its structural pricing power.” | BULL | Q2 2026 Jun 30, 2025 | View Pitch |
East Capital Jacob Grapengiesser, David Nicholls | “The manager highlights that surging AI data center demand for memory chips is severely outstripping supply, allowing major producers to continuously raise prices. SK Hynix is expected to see a 60-70% increase in server DRAM prices in early 2026, driving significant earnings upgrades. Despite comparable growth and margins to US peers, the stock remains attractively valued at 8.4x P/E.” | BULL | Q4 2025 Dec 31, 2025 | View Pitch |
Polaris International Equity Bernard Horn | “SK Hynix experienced short-term share price pressure due to geopolitical friction, U.S. tariff fears, and domestic South Korean political instability. However, the manager regards the downturn as an overdone knee-jerk reaction given the company's strong positioning in AI memory infrastructure.” | BULL | Q4 2024 Dec 31, 2024 | View Pitch |
Each excerpt above is the manager's commentary on this ticker specifically. The full letter has the rest of their portfolio thinking, risk discussion, and broader institutional context.