SEOUL, May 29 (AJP) - Samsung Electro-Mechanics' shares landed comfortably above 2 million won milestone Friday, flying over 15 percent to No. 3 on South Korea's main bourse — the culmination of a two-month rerating that has carried the stock from around twentieth on the KOSPI to within reach of the two trillion-won chip giants.
By 1:00 p.m., the stock traded at 2,130,000 won, up 15.2 percent from the previous session, with a market capitalization just short of of 160 trillion won. Amid AI frenzy, the chipmaking equipment maker's stock has swelled 5 times and nearly 20 times from a year-ago period.
Behind the breakout is a single product driving the change in sentiment: multilayer ceramic capacitors, known as MLCCs, used in AI servers and high-performance computing systems. The stock gained renewed momentum after the company on May 20 disclosed a 1.56 trillion won two-year contract with an unnamed U.S. big-tech company to supply silicon capacitors.
Brokerages have flagged rising MLCC prices as utilization rates climb across the industry, and have raised their targets on the stock accordingly.
Hyundai Motor Securities on Thursday lifted its target price to 2.3 million won, citing a sustained upturn in the company's business cycle. The previous day, Daol Investment Securities also raised its target to 2.3 million won, pointing to simultaneous booms in MLCCs and in flip-chip ball-grid-array, or FC-BGA, substrates used in advanced chip packaging.
The size of Thursday's single-day move, however, suggests the upgrades caught a market already primed for the rotation that has run through the broader AI value chain this week.
"It is worth paying attention to the MLCC price increases as overall utilization rises, and to the accelerating industry cycle," said Kim Jong-bae, an analyst at Hyundai Motor Securities.
He argued that the current upturn would persist over the long term and that the core triggers for share-price gains — industry cycle, technical capability, market position and earnings — were all present at Samsung Electro-Mechanics.
The dual exposure to MLCCs and FC-BGA substrates has placed the company at the intersection of two segments of the AI value chain that, until recently, drew less attention than the memory chipmakers themselves.
As capital has rotated this week from Samsung Electronics and SK hynix toward names with operating exposure to AI infrastructure, Samsung Electro-Mechanics has been one of the clearest beneficiaries.
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