The relentless surge in memory chip prices over the past few months has driven a vast divide between winners and losers in the stock market, and investors don’t see any end in sight.

Companies from game console maker

Nintendo Co.

to big PC brands and

Apple Inc.

suppliers are seeing shares slump on profitability concerns. Memory producers, meanwhile, are soaring to unprecedented heights. Money managers and analysts are now assessing which companies can best navigate the squeeze by locking in supplies, raising product prices or redesigning to use less memory.

A Bloomberg gauge of global consumer electronics makers is down 10 per cent since the end of September while a basket of

memory makers

including

Samsung Electronics Co.

has surged roughly 160 per cent. The question now is how much is priced in.

“What remains underappreciated is the risk around duration — current valuations largely factor in that the disruption will normalize within one to two quarters,” said Vivian Pai, a fund manager at Fidelity International. “We believe industry tightness is likely to persist,” possibly through the rest of the year, she added.

Memory chip

shortages and pricing are being mentioned frequently by companies in earnings reports and conference calls. In one of the latest examples, Honda Motor Co. noted Tuesday that supply risks are emerging for memory components.

Investors are hearing the alarm bells. Shares of

Qualcomm Inc.

fell more than eight per cent last Thursday after the smartphone processor maker signalled memory constraints will limit phone production. Nintendo slid the most in 18 months in Tokyo the day after it warned of margin pressure from the shortages.

PC makers are among those hit the hardest. Both

Lenovo Group Ltd.

and

Dell Technologies Inc.

have dropped over 25 per cent from their respective peaks in October. Worries that higher chip prices will dampen PC demand have also spread to Swiss peripherals maker Logitech International SA, which has declined nearly 30 per cent from a November peak.

Elsewhere, shares of Chinese electric vehicle and smartphone makers from BYD Co. to Xiaomi Corp. have also been sluggish on worries related to the chip shortages.

“Memory prices have really moved from a background conversation to headlines this earnings season,” said Charu Chanana, chief investment strategist at Saxo Bank AS. “The market broadly understands that memory prices are up and supply is tight — that’s no longer new information, so I would assume that’s priced in. But it does look like the timeline of this supply tightness is now starting to be questioned.”

Concerns over demand and earnings are weighing on the corporate landscape, compounded by worries that massive AI infrastructure spending by United States hyperscalers will further exacerbate memory-chip shortages. The massive build‑out of AI infrastructure led by the likes of Amazon.com Inc. has shifted production capacity toward high-bandwidth memory and away from traditional DRAM.

This has led to what some are describing as a “supercycle,” breaking the usual boom-to-bust patterns of memory supply and demand.

Spot prices for DRAM have shot up more than 600 per cent in the past few months, even as demand for end-products such as smartphones and cars remains weak. On top of that, AI is creating new demand for NAND chips and other storage products, driving up costs in those segments as well.

As such, memory chip makers have been the standout winners among

tech stocks

. Shares of

SK Hynix Inc.

, a key supplier of HBM to

Nvidia Corp.

, are up more than 150 per cent just since the end of September in Seoul. Among makers of more pedestrian chips, Japan’s Kioxia Holdings Corp. and Taiwan’s Nanya Technology Corp. are up more than 270 per cent each in that span, while Sandisk Corp. has climbed more than 400 per cent in New York.

“Historically the memory cycle normally lasted 3-4 years,” said Jian Shi Cortesi, a fund manager at GAM Investment Management in Zurich, adding that she has been holding memory chip shares for a long time. “The current cycle already exceeded the previous cycles both in length and magnitude, and we are not seeing demand momentum softening.”

—With assistance from Henry Ren, Vlad Savov, Neil Campling, David Watkins and Subrat Patnaik.

Bloomberg.com

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