Ahead of Children’s Day, Samsung Electronics ranked No. 1 last month among domestic stocks gifted to minors, measured by number of transactions. The trend comes as more accounts are being opened in minors’ names this year, expanding investing under children’s accounts.
KB Securities said on May 5 that Samsung Electronics accounted for 56.3% of stocks its customers gifted to children age 18 and under through the firm’s “stock gifting” service.
The service allows users to transfer shares they hold to another person through a brokerage’s home trading system (HTS) or mobile trading system (MTS) by entering the recipient’s name and mobile phone number.
Samsung’s dominance is widely seen as reflecting expectations for a semiconductor upturn driven by expanding artificial intelligence demand. Seo Seung-yeon, an analyst at DB Securities, said, “At this earnings briefing, Samsung Electronics said it is pursuing or has completed multi-year memory contracts with some customers due to strong AI demand,” adding that the company “said it plans to supply samples of next-generation high-bandwidth memory (HBM4E) starting in the second quarter this year, demonstrating leadership in the HBM market.”
After Samsung Electronics, the most-gifted stocks were Kia (6.5%), Kakao (6.1%), HLB (3.7%), EcoPro BM (3.6%), Deoksan Techopia (3.0%), DS Dansuk (2.5%) and POSCO Holdings (2.1%). SK hynix was about 1.5%, which was attributed to its higher share price.
Account openings by minors are also rising. Daishin Securities said new accounts for children ages 0 to 9 increased 119.2% as of last month compared with January. That was the fourth-highest growth rate, following people in their 30s (352.6%), 20s (308.4%) and 40s (220.8%). New accounts among teenagers also rose 101.1%.
Growth was more modest among older age groups. New accounts rose 45.6% for people in their 50s and 14.7% for those in their 60s, while the 70s and 80s increased 29.7% and 31.9%, respectively. For those 90 and older, new accounts fell 25.0%.
Despite the increase in accounts, investment balances declined across most age groups: ages 0 to 9 (-6.0%), teens (-28.1%), 20s (-21.5%), 30s (-39.2%), 50s (-78.2%), 60s (-82.3%), 70s (-42.5%) and 80s (-74.1%). The figures suggest the rise in new accounts is being driven more by small investments than by large inflows of funds.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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