Kosdaq's Yearly Gains Exceed 100%, Surpassing Records from the Dot-com Bubble Era

The Korean stock market's meteoric rise is already considered a historic occurrence.

According to Bloomberg, the Korean benchmark index KOSPI has seen its year-to-date gains exceed 100%, not only surpassing the gains on the eve of the internet bubble in the late 1990s but also setting a new record since the industrial boom in Korea in the late 1980s. On Wednesday, the single-day gain reached as high as 5.1%, with KOSPI skyrocketing from 5,000 points to 8,000 points in just a few months.

The core engine of this market move has been the strong upward movement of the two major memory giants, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics. So far this year, the performance of KOSPI can be compared to the 102% annual gain of the Nasdaq 100 index in 1999—right before the bursting of the internet bubble.

Nevertheless, most market observers have not sounded the alarm. In their view, this market move is fundamentally different from 1999: the global demand for memory chips is undergoing a structural shift, transitioning from a cyclical pattern to a persistent growth trend, with the surge in AI computing power demand being the core driver of this change.