Daily Brief South Korea: Korea Investment Holdings Co, Ltd., Jeju Semiconductor, Ymc Co Ltd and more

• Korea Investment Partners (KIP) has made a home run investment in Anthropic. Korea Investment Holdings Co, Ltd. (071050 KS) owns a 100% stake in Korea Investment Partners
• Assuming a 50% share dilution from its original investment in August 2024 ($10 million), KIP’s stake in Anthropic would reach $555 million (if Anthropic is valued at $2 trillion).
• Korea Investment Holdings Co, Ltd. (071050 KS) has a market cap of 10.4 trillion won, so this would be 7.4% of its market cap. 

• Jeju Semiconductor Corp (080220 KS) is a leading South Korean fabless memory semiconductor company specializing in low-power, low-to-medium density memory solutions, including Low-Power SDRAM (LPDDR), Multi-Chip Packages (MCP), and Pseudo SRAM (pSRAM) tailored for 5G IoT, telecommunications, automotive electronics, and On-Device AI edge hardware.
• The company is undergoing an unprecedented structural earnings inflection, driven by acute supply tightness in legacy low-power memory as Tier-1 memory integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) aggressively shift fabrication capacity to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and leading-edge DDR5. This dynamic propelled FY25 revenue up 86.2% YoY to KRW 302.2 billion, followed by an explosive 1H26 run-rate where 2Q26 quarterly revenue reached KRW 289.9 billion and gross margin expanded to 50.16%.
• While long-term growth prospects are bolstered by strategic foundry alliances with SK hynix and Taiwanese wafer foundries alongside rising automotive design wins (AEC-Q100), institutional investors must balance this upside against acute working capital strain, heightened cash conversion cycles (1H26 operating cash flow remained deeply negative due to rapid inventory ramp-up), and cyclical exposure to fabless foundry pricing.

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• Strategic Niche in Display & Semiconductor Consumables: YMC Co., Ltd. (155650 KS) is a specialized South Korean manufacturer of physical vapor deposition (PVD) sputtering targets, backing plates, process chamber components, and precision surface treatments for Flat Panel Displays (OLED/LCD) and semiconductor manufacturing, augmented by display fab relocation engineering services.
• Operational Inflection Point in 1H26: Following a multi-year cyclical contraction driven by the conclusion of major legacy LCD fab migration contracts and customer destocking (2025 revenue of KRW 172.8bn; net income of KRW 1.3bn), quarterly financial performance demonstrated a clear operational rebound through 1H26, with Q2 2026 revenue expanding to KRW 53.4bn and net margin recovering to 4.58%.
• Compelling Valuation Asymmetry with Balance Sheet Resilience: At the current price of KRW 3,205, YMC reflects deep-value characteristics (Smartkarma Value 5/5) supported by a 2.34% dividend yield, robust balance sheet resilience (Resilience 4/5), and significant upside leverage to Gen 8.6 IT OLED commercialization and high-margin SiC focus ring recycling expansion.

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