AI boom:South Korea's stock market also overtakes Canada after several EU states
Driven by enormous price gains at Samsung and SK Hynix, South Korea's stock market is setting new records and is already the seventh-largest globally.
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As a consequence of the AI boom and the associated stock market rallies, the South Korean stock market has now also overtaken Canada's, making it the seventh-largest in the world. This is reported by Bloomberg, citing the total market value of all companies listed in Korea. This has reportedly reached $4.59 trillion, 71 percent more than at the beginning of the year. Canadian companies, meanwhile, only total $4.5 trillion. At the end of April, Bloomberg had already determined that South Korea's stock market had overtaken that of Great Britain, two months prior it had surpassed France, and Germany a month before that.
South Korea's economy is not keeping pace with the stock rally
The sharp rise in the KOSPI, South Korea's largest stock index, is mainly due to two companies: Samsung and SK Hynix. They dominate the memory market, especially for RAM (DRAM), where they account for two-thirds of global revenue. They sell components like DDR5, LPDDR5X, and High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) to manufacturers of processors and AI accelerators, as well as to cloud hyperscalers. They are also heavily involved in the SSD business with NAND flash memory. The high demand for DRAM and NAND flash in AI data centers has caused a memory crisis since the end of 2025, leading to a multiplication of prices. As a result, manufacturer profits are soaring.
Together, Samsung and SK Hynix account for almost half of the total weighting in the KOSPI index. Samsung's stock has risen by about 125 percent in South Korea since the beginning of the year, while SK Hynix's stock has risen by 150 percent. With this increase, they have also caused the overall KOSPI value to skyrocket. While the total value of companies listed in Canada has risen by seven percent since the beginning of the year, in South Korea it has been more than 70 percent. There is no end in sight yet, Bloomberg quotes an expert.
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However, the South Korean stock market rally does not mean that South Korea's economy is overtaking countries like Germany, France, and Great Britain. According to figures from the International Monetary Fund, South Korea's gross domestic product ranks 15th worldwide, far behind not only the largest EU states but also Russia, Australia, or Mexico. Germany's economy is almost three times larger. Bloomberg has also attributed the upswing in the South Korean stock market to shareholder-friendly reforms and the country's growing importance in the AI supply chain. Both have contributed to the stock value becoming increasingly decoupled from overall economic factors.
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(mho)
