SK Hynix broke ground on its first U.S. facility and CEO Kwak Noh-Jung announced Indiana will become a key memory production base by 2030. Not a memory production base. A key memory production base. The word key does heavy lifting here.
Indiana currently ranks below Alabama in things people associate with semiconductor manufacturing. Alabama is not on the list either.
Kwak stood at a groundbreaking ceremony and told everyone assembled that by 2030 this exact location would matter to the global memory supply chain. Six years from now. The man gazed into the future and saw Indiana producing the chips that power your phone and decided to say that out loud at a ceremony.
Retail traders heard this news and immediately googled whether SK Hynix has a ticker symbol they can buy. It does. They will lose money on it for reasons unrelated to this factory.
The facility will take years to build and more years to ramp production. By the time it outputs meaningful volume the memory market will have cycled through two crashes and three recoveries. None of that will correlate with anything Kwak said today. But he said it anyway because CEOs speak at groundbreaking ceremonies and someone has to fill the time between the shovel photo-op and the catered lunch.
This is real. The factory is real. The investment is real. Indiana will have a semiconductor fab. What it will not have is relevance to your portfolio or any trade you make this decade.
Kwak flew to Indiana, grabbed a shovel, and promised the future. The future will arrive on schedule. Your returns will not.
Photo by on Unsplash
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