Daily Woody | Jun 23, 2026 — SK Hynix Dethrones Samsung, KOSPI Hits Record
This is not Samsung stumbling. It is the AI boom rewriting the hierarchy inside memory. Commodity DRAM once defined the business; now custom HBM does, and the company that bet on it leads. As Meritz analyst Kim Sunwoo put it, customized AI memory changed the industry’s economics and let SK Hynix take the lead. The reversal is stark for a firm that nearly sold itself to Micron in 2002 and posted a record loss in 2023.
But read the index, not just the headline. Samsung’s total value still tops SK Hynix once preferred shares are counted (2,246 trillion won). And two chipmakers now account for roughly half of the entire KOSPI. A market this concentrated rises on a narrow base: when one stock sneezes, the whole index catches cold. The crown changed hands — and so did the market’s single point of failure.
On Dec. 3, 2024, then-president Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law for hours before parliament overturned it. He was later removed, and a cascade of trials has since convicted ministers and military officials — a slow legal reckoning still unfolding.
What was signed is a framework for managing the conflict, not ending it. The roadmap promises 60 more days of talks; the hard questions — nuclear inspections, sanctions, frozen assets — move to working groups, not the page. Iran’s foreign minister called the Lebanon de-confliction cell the “first real test,” which is another way of saying the deal’s survival now depends on whether Israel halts strikes it insists it is not bound to stop.
For Korea, the line that matters runs through Hormuz. Traffic had recovered to 25 vessels on June 18 — the most since mid-April — before Iran moved to close the strait again over Lebanon, cutting it sharply (AXSMarine). A stable waterway keeps oil flowing and underwrites the risk appetite that lifted the KOSPI to its record. Seoul has no seat at this table, yet its energy bill and its stock index are both being negotiated in Bürgenstock.
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