Recently, the TMT sector has risen sharply again, and the net value of related theme funds has obviously recovered. Many Christians speculate whether the theme market will make a comeback. Among the subdivided sectors, the memory chip sector is particularly eye-catching. Coupled with the recent catalysis of Nvidia’s performance disclosure and domestic manufacturers’ chip price increases, the semiconductor sector has once again become the focus of market attention.
Memory chip sector soars
After nearly a month of correction, the TMT market has made a comeback. As of the close of trading on June 2, the SWS first-level industries such as communications, media, and electronics have all increased by more than 5% in the past 10 days, and the net value of many related theme funds has “recovered blood” significantly.
Among them, the rebound of the memory chip segment in the semiconductor field is particularly significant. Flush data shows that as of the close on June 2, the largest cumulative increase in memory chips since May 15 has exceeded 20%. During the period, Ruineng Technology once appeared with seven consecutive boards. Last week, many memory chip stocks rose again. Biwin Storage rose by more than 20% during the week, and Shenzhen Technology’s stock price hit a new high in the past two years.
Under the surge in the memory chip sector, the net value of related funds also rebounded. For example, Shenzhen Technology’s largest public equity holding fund, Huaan Media Internet Mixed Fund, has risen by more than 6% in the past week, ranking among the top 3% of similar funds; Dawei’s third largest circulating shareholder, Huaxia Industry Prosperity Mixed Fund, has risen the most in the past month. The top 1.2% of similar funds.
For this round of rise in the memory chip sector, Bao Xiaohui, chairman and chief investment officer of Changli Assets, believes that there are two main reasons for it: First, the industry cycle is picking up. The memory chip industry has entered a down cycle that lasted nearly two years since 2021. With the outbreak of a new wave of artificial intelligence, AI servers will bring new incremental demand to the memory chip industry. It is expected that the market size of the memory chip in 2023 will Recovered to 540 billion yuan; second, the emergence of phenomenal products. Recently, Nvidia released the DGXGH200 supercomputer. This supercomputer is composed of 256 GH200 superchips and equipped with 144TB of memory, which is nearly 500 times that of Nvidia’s current DGXA100 system. Storage is one of the three most important core elements in AI computing power requirements. First, it is expected to usher in explosive growth.
The attention of semiconductors continues to increase
Recently, hot events in the semiconductor industry, including memory chips, have occurred frequently, which once pushed the semiconductor sector to the forefront of market discussions.
Nvidia disclosed its first quarter report for 2023 on the evening of May 24 local time. The company’s revenue in the first quarter was US$7.19 billion, an increase of 19% from the previous quarter. After the release of the quarterly report, Nvidia’s stock price rose in response, an increase of nearly 30%, and its market value rose by US$184 billion in one trading day.
However, from the perspective of fund holdings, some asset management institutional investors have not captured the opportunity of this rise. For example, Baiji Investment and Mu Mujie were exposed to have significantly reduced their positions in Nvidia in the first quarter. Among them, Baiji Investment reduced its holdings by 1.36 million shares, and Mu Mujie reduced its holdings by 110,000 shares.
After the performance disclosure of Nvidia, many institutions raised the target price of Nvidia. However, there is also news that Asworth Damodaran, the European financial giant Rothschild family and contemporary investment valuation expert, has recently reduced some of his shares in Nvidia.
Affected by the surge of Nvidia, many related domestic stocks also rose sharply. The outstanding stocks such as Jinbaize, Tianfu Communications, Hongbo, and Victory Giant were once hailed by the market as “Nvidia concept stocks”. A small number of stocks are favored by hot money. For this reason, Jinbaize issued an announcement to clarify that it has not supplied products to Nvidia, and there is no related income; Dawei also stated that it has no cooperation with Nvidia for the time being.
In addition, important domestic storage equipment suppliers announced the resumption of merger negotiations. Manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics informed distributors that they would no longer sell DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) chips at lower prices than current prices. Yangtze Memory officially notified enterprise-level NAND (computer flash memory devices) Matters such as price increases also once attracted the market’s attention to the semiconductor industry.
From the perspective of capital flow, the semiconductor sector has recently been favored by funds. Northbound funds, known as “smart funds”, have increased their holdings of 66 semiconductor stocks in the past five days, with a market value of nearly 3 billion yuan, ranking first among more than 80 sub-sectors. Many semiconductor and chip-themed funds have also increased significantly since mid-to-late April. Among them, the shares of products such as E Fund China Securities Chip Industry ETF and Huaan SSE Science and Technology Innovation Chip ETF have reached record highs.
Institutions debate the market outlook
Regarding the market outlook of semiconductors represented by memory chips, Liu Yan, chairman of Anjue Assets, believes that the resurgence of the current AI concept has indeed brought new opportunities for the chip semiconductor industry. The application of artificial intelligence requires a large number of chips and semiconductor equipment support, which has brought many new growth points and development opportunities to the industry; at the same time, the technology iteration and market demand of the chip semiconductor industry are also changing rapidly, which also brings huge development opportunities for the industry. variables and uncertainties. Overall, there are still opportunities for chips and semiconductors to “get into the car” in the third quarter, but investors need to treat them rationally and pay attention to risk control.
Guo Zhenyue of Chuangjin Hexin Fund believes that from the perspective of industry fundamentals and the demand side, the industry has gone through a period of destocking, and the current inventory level continues to approach the normal level. The destocking of end customers is coming to an end, and the inflection point of industry recovery can be expected. On the supply side, several major storage giants in the world have successively cut capital expenditures in 2023, and the prices of some products have been close to or lower than cost prices. The industry giant Samsung Electronics announced in April 2023 that it plans to reduce the production of memory chips, and the gap between supply and demand is expected to narrow. At present, we are paying close attention to the investment opportunities brought about by the marginal changes in the bottoming out of the storage industry cycle. If the demand picks up faster in the future, the performance of the industry may be more optimistic.
Dong Chengfei, partner and chief research officer of Ruijun Asset Management, believes that the semiconductor industry will gradually evolve into a “chip shortage”, and the price of chips in China and even the world, especially the price of automotive chips, will increase very alarmingly. In terms of investment opportunities, Dong Chengfei believes that compared with silicon semiconductors, which are the most discussed in the market, third-generation semiconductors, that is, compound semiconductors, are small in size, less competitive with international players, and less demanding on equipment, so they are the most promising. Road overtaking. As for A-share investment, he said that the business model of the consumables sector is the best, followed by the packaging, digital, equipment, and manufacturing sectors.