Foreign and institutional investors sold off 4 trillion won ($3 billion) worth of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix stocks in the past month, according to recent data. Retail investors, commonly referred to as “ants” in South Korea, have absorbed most of the sell-offs.
The large-scale exodus came after Nvidia’s second-quarter earnings failed to exceed Wall Street’s expectations, reigniting another heavy sell-off in chipmaking stocks.
Foreign institutions offloaded 2.088 trillion won worth of Samsung Electronics stocks in August, according to the Korea Exchange on September 1. Domestic institutions sold off 1.378 trillion won worth of Samsung shares. Retail investors purchased 3.234 trillion won worth of Samsung stocks during the same period.
Similarly, foreign and domestic institutions sold off 900.2 billion won and 305.1 billion SK Hynix shares, respectively. Retail investors remained net buyers, absorbing 1.18 trillion won worth of SK Hynix shares last month.
Analysts say these sell-offs are related to Nvidia’s recent earnings report. Shares in Nvidia fell more than 6% on August 30, despite the tech giant’s revenue more than doubled in the last quarter. Nvidia’s second-quarter revenue in the three months to July was $30.4 billion, exceeding Wall Street forecasts of $28.7 billion. But investors were disappointed with the figure because revenue growth was the smallest compared to the last six quarters. Nvidia’s guidance for the third quarter also showed a smaller year-over-year increase, forecasting a revenue of $32.5 billion.
Analysts explain that investor sentiment was further dampened by Nvidia’s lack of specific details regarding its next-generation artificial intelligence chips. Nvidia announced that mass production of TSMC-manufactured Blackwell processors will begin in the fourth quarter and could generate billions of dollars in sales, but it did not disclose a specific release schedule. The industry had previously anticipated that Blackwell would start shipping in the third quarter of this year.
Investors are also concerned that Nvidia’s demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) could potentially decline in the future, adversely affecting SK Hynix, who currently supplies most of the HBM chips Nvidia uses to make graphics processing units (GPUs).
“Many of the B100 and B200 models, which feature two GPUs and 192 gigabytes (GB) of HBM, have been canceled due to problems related to excessive power consumption,” said Lee Min-hee, an analyst at BNK Securities. “They are expected to be replaced by the B200A, which features one GPU and 144 GB of HBM.”
