"Her Power" | Zhi Yu Zhishan Fund Manager Sun Jiabao: Using keen insight and persistent technology to build a long-term upward trajectory, navigating through the cycle fog with a long-term perspective

In traditional understanding, strength is often associated with rigidity and sharpness, but the capital markets are never short of sharpness. Female fund managers are redefining professional strength by combining firmness and flexibility. The current “her power” precisely breaks this binary opposition—being firm means sticking to principles and bottom lines, while flexibility signifies wisdom and guidance. Together, they forge an investment path that balances strength and warmth, reflected in net value curves and long-term value.

“Investing in outstanding companies at reasonable prices,” summarizes Sun Jiabao, fund manager of Zhiyu Zhishan.

Fund Manager of Zhiyu Zhishan, Sun Jiabao

Using Sharp Insight and Steadfast Technology

Since earning her Ph.D. from King’s College London in 2017, Sun Jiabao has been engaged in investment research. She joined Zhiyu Zhishan Investment in 2021 and has been managing funds for five years. Currently, she primarily manages Zhiyu Zhishan Value Investment No. 4, which focuses on global storage opportunities.

Her investment style centers on sharp insight, excelling at detecting industry reversal signals amid data noise. Looking back, Sun Jiabao reflects: During the storage downturn in 2023, she foresaw that AI servers would weaken the growth cycle of HBM, prompting her to decisively allocate to Korean storage stocks with heavy positions; early 2025, when NAND prices surged, she quickly followed up with U.S. and Japanese tech stocks, continuously seizing opportunities in the tech sector.

In long-term practice, her “sharpness” repeatedly manifests.

“Value investing involves not only investing in excellent companies at reasonable prices but also betting on the certainty of technological trends. As long as AI continues to reshape the fundamental logic of the world, short-term fluctuations are opportunities for strategic positioning,” she says.

As a female researcher, she has a profound understanding: “Women possess a superior ability to select the best among many options in research and investment. The best investments are often not about capturing numerous possibilities but about steadfastly holding onto the inevitable—those that are irreplaceable. This inevitability comes from observing and tracking industry trends.”

She believes risk control is an a priori logic embedded in every decision, not a passive mechanism triggered after setbacks. She admits she never pursues extreme leverage but instead hedges through global asset correlations and deep pre-judgment of technical pathway risks, ensuring her portfolio captures AI’s explosive potential while maintaining high safety margins.

Navigating Through Cycles with Long-Term Vision

Looking ahead to 2026, Sun Jiabao clearly states her top picks: storage chips, optical chips, and CPO (Chiplet Package Optimization), with a clear and firm logic.

First, in storage chips, driven by the AI wave, the super cycle of storage chip demand continues to exceed expectations. It is expected that shortages will persist throughout 2026 and into the first half of 2027. As AI applications enter the reasoning era, demands for memory capacity far surpass previous levels. AI agents require frequent access to massive vector databases during task execution, causing NAND capacity per GPU to grow exponentially.

Second, in optical chips, Lumentum reports a supply-demand gap of 25%-30%, and has secured CPO orders with backlog exceeding $400 million.

Third, in CPO, the commercialization inflection point is approaching. According to Yole, under optimistic scenarios (NVIDIA mass-producing CPO switches), 2035 CPO shipments could be ten times the baseline estimate.

She also rationally warns of risks: investors should pay attention to geopolitical reshaping of supply chains and valuation fluctuations caused by sudden technological shifts. However, current industry signals show no signs of these risks erupting, and overall industry trends remain positive.

Regarding hot topics like AI and quant strategies, she maintains an open and rational attitude: AI is not an opponent but a super assistant and digital colleague in research and investment.

Sun Jiabao explains that her research team has used over ten AI tools, with each member spending more than 1,000 hours on AI. These tools help efficiently process unstructured data, analyze financial reports of thousands of global tech companies, and integrate industry news—greatly enhancing research efficiency and coverage, even providing forward-looking investment ideas.

She emphasizes that AI and quantitative methods cannot replace deep human foresight and judgment about industry futures. Her team relies on their self-developed “AI Cybertan” research system to precisely capture opportunities and strictly avoid risks, adhering to the core philosophy of “investing in outstanding companies at reasonable prices.”

In team management, she pursues a self-driven, flat organizational structure. To ensure high adaptability to market changes, she employs three strategies: encouraging researchers to experiment with non-core positions through a fault-tolerant mechanism; conducting reviews of every investment decision logic; and emphasizing AI proficiency and global perspective—team members must be capable of using AI and reading multi-language literature to stay at the forefront of new technologies and stay aligned with insights from Silicon Valley and Seoul.

Looking to the future, she is confident and determined: she hopes to be a friend of time, a long-distance runner in the tech industry, using her unique female sharpness and resolve to precisely position investors in the most promising core assets during each technological paradigm shift.

Finally, she sincerely addresses her investors: the most captivating aspect of investing is the compound interest generated from realized insights. Thank you for your trust amid cyclical fluctuations. I will continue to carefully select each certainty, helping us pierce through market fog and patiently wait for cognitive dividends to bloom naturally over time.

Text / Xu Nannan Editing / Xu Nan