Profits Surged 18x, Yet the Stock Crashed! Is the "Super Cycle" for Memory Chips Coming to an End?

Can you believe it?

Samsung Electronics just released a "god-tier" earnings report—

Q2 operating profit of 89.4 trillion Korean won, soaring 1,810% year-on-year, surpassing even Nvidia to become the world's most profitable company in a single quarter.

One quarter's profit exceeded the total profit of the three years from 2023 to 2025.

And then?

The stock plunged nearly 7% on the day, directly triggering a circuit breaker on the Korea KOSPI index.

SK Hynix fell over 6%, Micron fell 4.7%, SanDisk fell over 7%, Western Digital fell nearly 8%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged 4.65%.

Explosive earnings, but a stock market crash.

Global memory chip stocks were dragged down by Samsung's earnings report.

This isn't as simple as "buy the rumor, sell the news."

This time, the "sell the fact" is completely different from before.

In the past, stocks fell when earnings missed expectations. This time, earnings beat expectations, but "didn't beat them by enough."

The market had already priced in "perfection." Samsung's stock had risen about 150% year-to-date, and all the good news was already chewed up and swallowed.

When expectations run faster than reality, reality becomes a negative catalyst.

But what really caught my attention is something else—

Morgan Stanley directly told clients: "Sell chips, buy cloud."

Morgan Stanley's Chief US Equity Strategist Michael Wilson compared semiconductor stocks to silver—both have experienced parabolic rises, both have commodity-like attributes, and commodities rise sharply but also fall hard.

There's also a new variable most people are overlooking—

Apple is testing CXMT's DRAM chips.

CXMT is already the world's fourth-largest DRAM producer. Apple brought them in not to "support domestic production," but as a bargaining chip—to have an extra card when negotiating supply contracts with Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron for the second half of 2026 through 2027.

This means the pricing power of the Big Three is being eroded.

If Apple can really use CXMT to force down prices, the price ceiling for memory chips could be much lower than anyone expects.

Is this wave of selling a periodic pullback, or a cyclical turning point?

My judgment: it's a bit of both, but the taste of a turning point is stronger.

In the short term, this is a healthy "profit-taking" and rotation of capital—what Morgan Stanley said about "sell chips, buy cloud" is happening. The capital expenditure growth rate of hyperscale cloud providers may be topping out, and funds are flowing from semiconductor stocks to cloud computing companies.

In the long term, Morgan Stanley is still bullish on memory, expecting earnings to grow another 35%-40% by 2027.

But the most succulent part of the "super cycle" has already been eaten.

Going forward, memory chips are no longer a sector where you can just buy blindly and lie back to make money. The pace of price increases is slowing, pricing power is being diluted, and capital is retreating.

One final sentence for all those still fantasizing that "memory will rise forever":

"Cycles don't disappear; they just find a new way to harvest those who believe they will never come again."#GUSD年化升至3.8% #美终止对伊朗石油制裁豁免 #SK海力士ADR获超额认购 $BTC $SAMSUNG $SKHY