This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. TheGatBull may earn a commission from some links at no cost to you — see our disclosure and full disclaimer.
In September 2022 I bought Samsung Electronics at 53,000 won because it felt like the safest thing a Korean retail investor could do. Two years of jonbeo later it was under 50,000 — and the one word that explained both the fall and the eventual six-fold recovery was sitting in the Korean reports the whole time: HBM.
The safest thing I could do — and how it nearly broke me
In September 2022 I did the safest thing a Korean retail investor can do. I bought Samsung Electronics (KRX: 005930) — the national stock, the one your parents own, the one that “can’t fail” — at 53,000 won.
Then I did the second most Korean thing possible: I held. We even have a word for it. Jonbeo (존버) — gritting your teeth and refusing to sell, no matter how red the screen gets. I jonbeo‘d for two years.
In November 2024, Samsung touched 49,900 won. Below fifty. The national champion, and I was underwater after holding through two years of “it’ll bounce back.” Ttah-heuk (따흑) — the sound of a Korean investor’s sigh.
Here is what actually stung. I thought I had been smart: buy the biggest, safest name in the country and wait. So why was the “safe” stock the one bleeding out? Because “safe” was the wrong word — and the English headlines I was reading never told me the right one.
The word the English headlines missed: HBM
Every English wire said the same thing: Samsung is cheap, the national champion at a discount, buy the dip. Every one of them missed the story. And the story was sitting in Korean industry reports the entire time. It had a three-letter name: HBM.
High-bandwidth memory is the stacked DRAM that Nvidia’s AI chips cannot run without. For decades Samsung was the undisputed king of memory. But when AI arrived, the crown quietly moved. Samsung’s smaller rival, SK Hynix, became Nvidia’s primary HBM supplier — while Samsung kept failing Nvidia’s qualification for its next-generation HBM.
While English headlines were calling Samsung “cheap,” the Korean press was reporting qualification setbacks and a widening share gap. By 2024, SK Hynix held a clear HBM lead, and in 2025 it overtook Samsung in annual operating profit for the first time ever — a result that would have sounded absurd a few years earlier.
🎩 Under the Gat — Wall Street calls this a “memory cycle.” Koreans call it jonbeo. The price of jonbeo gets paid in filing footnotes, not in headlines. If you only read the translation, you are always a season late.
So that 49,900 won? Not a random dip. It was the market pricing a structural miss that the English summaries were not translating. That is the gap — not the price, the reason. Foreign investors reading only English saw “national champion on sale.” Anyone reading the Korean source saw “national champion losing the most important race in chips.”
Samsung vs SK Hynix — the rivalry that explains the chart
| Samsung Electronics (005930) | SK Hynix (000660) | |
|---|---|---|
| Business | DRAM, NAND, foundry, HBM | DRAM, NAND, HBM leader |
| AI cycle | Next-gen HBM qualification delays (2024), then fights back with HBM4 (2026) | Nvidia’s primary HBM supplier; first to overtake Samsung in annual profit (2025) |
| Decisive difference | Diversified chipmaker with its own foundry | Early HBM lead and priority Nvidia supply |
Not a perfect parallel — Samsung is a diversified memory-and-foundry giant, while SK Hynix is the focused HBM play. For US readers, think of Micron as the closest American memory comparison, though it trails both on HBM.
The twist: the same three letters dug it back out
Here is the part that makes me laugh today. The same three letters that buried Samsung are the ones that dug it back out.
In September 2025, Samsung’s HBM3E finally cleared Nvidia’s qualification and the stock began to turn. Then, in early 2026, Samsung’s next-generation HBM4 cleared qualification by both Nvidia and AMD and moved into mass production. The stock did not just recover. Samsung crossed a $1 trillion market capitalization in February 2026, joining TSMC in that elite club, and by June 2026 it became the first single stock to top 2,000 trillion won, trading around 347,000 won.
Do the math on my 53,000-won entry. The “safe” stock that nearly broke me turned into roughly six times what I paid.
So when it cleared 300,000 won, I sold half. Not because I stopped believing — because two years underwater teaches you to take the win off the table and let the rest prove itself. The half I am still holding is not a prayer. It is a thesis: the same HBM story that buried Samsung is the one carrying it now.
🎩 Under the Gat — The same three letters buried it and revived it. Read the language, not just the ticker — the answer arrives in Korean before it arrives in English.
What jonbeo actually taught me
So what did jonbeo actually teach me? Not “diamond hands always win” — half of mine are cash today. It taught me that “safe” and “cheap” were never the reasons. HBM was the reason — on the way down and on the way back up. And the whole story sat in the Korean source months before the English headline caught up.
If you want to invest in Korea, stop reading the translated headline. Read what it was translated from. That gap — between the English summary and the Korean original — is the entire reason this account exists.
— Mr. Gat 🐂
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can’t foreign investors just read English headlines on Korean stocks?
Prices get translated, but the reasons usually appear first in the Korean source — filings, industry reports, and local press. With Samsung in 2024, English wires said cheap while Korean reports were documenting HBM qualification delays and a share-loss to SK Hynix.
Why is HBM so central to Samsung’s stock?
High-bandwidth memory is the bottleneck for AI chips and the swing factor for memory margins. Whether a maker passes Nvidia and AMD qualification effectively decides the profit gap between Samsung and SK Hynix.
Is Samsung expensive now?
Memory is deeply cyclical, so valuations swing hard with the cycle — this is not a price call. Do your own work and remember this is not financial advice.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. TheGatBull may earn a commission from some links at no cost to you — see our disclosure and full disclaimer.