VanessaCao

Thoughts from my Shanghai field trip Sentiment among Greater China investors was far worse than I expected. Unlike the US market, A shares had not seen a single rebound since July. Still holding Chinese and Hong Kong AI stocks that had crashed and Korean memory stocks that had collapsed, investors kept pressing me on when memory would bounce back. Many investors said the AI trade was over, and a few said they doubted whether even 2027 capex, not just 2028, would go ahead as planned. Overall, the bearish sentiment was so strong that even I, a bull before coming to China, started to waver. It got to the point where, faced with the bear case that memory prices could start falling in the third quarter of next year, I took it seriously and couldn't refute it. As the conversations went on, I gradually began to understand where their pessimism was coming from. In the end, they were all asking the same question. So what comes after AI coding? What will be the next engine of ARR for Anthropic and OpenAI? Several candidates came up. AI4S, AI chip design, and so on... But none of them clearly convinced investors. I couldn't offer a clear answer either. Sure, there are rumors that Anthropic has made major breakthroughs in both AI4S and AI chip design, but what we actually want to know is when any of that turns into money. With AI4S, there could be beneficiaries right away, such as companies that sell lab monkeys or diagnostic kits. In fact, there already are. But while we can trade those names in the short term, what we ultimately want to know is whether Anthropic can make money by developing drugs. That is still several years away. As for AI chip design, the TAM itself is hard to calculate, and even if you do calculate it, it is hard to monetize. That makes it difficult for the market to believe in. Honestly, this feels like the hardest market in history. If a company isn't making money, selling makes sense. But right now the market sells even when companies are making money, even when they beat, and even when they say demand will stay solid all the way through 2028 and 2029. So my recommendation to investors was to buy memory, and within memory, DRAM. Not because I have conviction in the DRAM cycle, but because I see it as a relatively defensive choice within the AI trade. Memory stocks are now trading close to 1x P/B on 2027 BPS. Historically, memory stocks have staged technical rebounds when they fell below 1x P/B. And even if the broader market falls further from here, the three DRAM makers will keep buying back their own shares. I thought that would guarantee a certain level of buying and concluded the stocks would have downside support. Of course, I don't know whether memory stocks can break above their previous highs. That depends on whether sentiment across the broader market recovers. But I think there is a fairly good chance that memory outperforms the rest of the AI trade.