"Is the semiconductor boom over?"... The Bank of Korea's remark that will reassure Samsung and SK hynix shareholders

[Financial News] The Bank of Korea has officially pushed back against recent claims in parts of the financial sector that the semiconductor industry has already peaked. It said demand is surging as investment in AI infrastructure expands, while supply growth is being delayed by the difficulty of producing high-performance chips. As a result, the global semiconductor upturn is likely to continue for a considerable period.
According to Yonhap News Agency on the 13th, the Bank of Korea said in a written response submitted to the office of Park Sung-hoon of the People Power Party that the current global semiconductor market is in a "supply-constrained phase" in which demand is outpacing supply.
The central bank said the boom is being driven by strong global investment in AI infrastructure, including large-scale data centers, creating a trend that far exceeds a typical economic expansion.
In particular, the Bank of Korea stressed that this semiconductor upcycle differs fundamentally from past short-term cycles. In the past, the market moved with replacement cycles for ordinary IT devices. This time, however, global companies are driving demand through aggressive investment amid a fundamental transformation of the industrial ecosystem brought on by the spread of AI.
On the supply side, however, bottlenecks remain. Advanced high-performance products such as High Bandwidth Memory are technically difficult to produce, so it takes a long time before mass production can begin. In addition, as the market has shifted toward highly customized, order-based products, companies face constraints that make it difficult to sharply expand output in advance, as they did in the past.
In fact, the current semiconductor expansion has continued for 40 months since March 2023. That makes it a record-long boom, far exceeding the average duration of 29 months for the five upcycles seen between 2000 and 2020.
As a result, the Bank of Korea's outlook for the industry has also become longer than before. Citing analyses from major global investment banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, the central bank said there are still some uncertainties about the pace of technology diffusion, but the global semiconductor market is expected to remain strong at least through next year.
This shift in assessment appears to have been driven by semiconductor export performance that has recently far exceeded expectations. Customs-cleared semiconductor exports surged 171.4% year on year in April and 167.7% in May. In June, when monthly exports topped $100 billion, the upward trend is estimated to have accelerated even further.


moon@fnnews.com Moon Young-jin Reporter