Mirae Asset Slashes Samsung, SK Hynix Targets 33%—Still Says Buy

Mirae Asset Securities just cut its price targets on Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix by roughly a third apiece — and kept a "Buy" rating on both, a split verdict that captures how confused Wall Street and Yeouido are about a chip-sector rout that has now triggered back-to-back circuit breakers on the Kospi.

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What happened

Mirae Asset lowered its target on Samsung Electronics to ₩370,000 from ₩550,000, and its SK Hynix target to ₩2.8 million from ₩4.2 million, according to Seoul Economic Daily. Both cuts land at almost exactly 33%. Analyst Kim Young-gun framed the move as a valuation-multiple reset rather than an earnings downgrade, telling clients the China-related overhang has "limited" impact on profit estimates through 2028 — the target moved because the market's willingness to pay for that profit stream just got repriced, not because the profit stream itself changed.

The cuts followed the twin-shock selloff I covered in Kospi's Worst Day Ever: 10.84% Crash Shatters the 6,000 Line: Samsung fell roughly 13.4%-13.6% on July 28, its worst single-day drop in nearly two decades, while SK Hynix dropped about 14.5%-14.7%, together erasing an estimated $270 billion in combined market value.

Why it matters — market reaction so far

The selloff wasn't a one-day event. A second circuit breaker hit on July 29 as the Kospi fell as much as 8% intraday, with SK Hynix down more than 11% and Samsung off more than 9% before the index found a floor in the 5,200 range. That's eight circuit-breaker triggers on the Kospi in 2026 alone — more than the total number recorded across every year since the mechanism was introduced after the dot-com crash. Against that backdrop, a brokerage cutting price targets by a third while still telling clients to buy is an unusual signal: it suggests Mirae Asset sees the drop as an overreaction to a structural threat rather than confirmation of one.

Mirae Asset's note also pointed to a silver lining most retail investors overlook in a crash: the plunge in share price has mechanically pushed up Samsung's dividend yield, making the stock more attractive to income-focused holders even as its growth narrative gets questioned.

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Who and what is affected

The trigger for the whole selloff was three converging pieces of news out of China: memory chipmaker CXMT's Shanghai STAR Market debut, where shares reportedly surged more than 400%; reports that Chinese toolmakers have begun mass-producing domestic deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography equipment for use at SMIC and CXMT; and an overnight slide in Nvidia shares tied to renewed "round-tripping" financing concerns. Together they revived fears that China can close the memory-chip gap faster than expected and flood the DRAM/NAND market with supply — the same dynamic I flagged in CXMT's Expansion and Nvidia's Financing Doubts Just Sank Kospi.

It's not just Samsung and SK Hynix. The panic has already prompted Seoul's regulators to move on leverage limits, as I noted in Seoul's Regulators Move to Cap Leverage After Chip Crash, and the sell-off has spread to memory names in Taiwan. It also lands just weeks after SK Hynix posted record quarterly profit but still sold off on a revenue miss — ₩79.32 trillion versus a roughly ₩84 trillion consensus — a dynamic covered in SK Hynix Posts Record Profit, Stock Sinks 8.76% on the Miss. That miss is part of why analysts are now recalibrating multiples rather than fundamentals: the earnings power is intact, but the market's patience for anything short of a beat has thinned.

What to watch next

Three things will determine whether Mirae Asset's "buy the overreaction" call ages well:

• Whether other brokerages follow with similar target cuts — a single note maintaining Buy despite a one-third target cut is notable; a wave of similar revisions across Korean and international desks would confirm this is becoming the Street's consensus read rather than an outlier call.
• Confirmation (or denial) of China's DUV progress — the reports of domestic lithography tools entering service at SMIC and CXMT are the fundamental root of this selloff; further detail on yield, output volume, and whether these tools can actually produce competitive HBM will matter more than any single day's price action.
• Whether Kospi volatility triggers further regulatory action — with eight circuit breakers already this year, additional leverage curbs or trading halts could reshape how retail money moves in and out of these names in the near term.

This is not financial advice — always do your own research before making investment decisions.

The gap between Mirae Asset's slashed price targets and its unchanged Buy rating is the story here: it's a bet that the Kospi's historic streak of circuit breakers reflects a liquidity and sentiment shock more than a permanent repricing of Samsung and SK Hynix's earnings power. Whether that bet is right depends almost entirely on how real China's lithography breakthrough turns out to be — and that's still an open question, not a settled one.