美股科技股抛售蔓延至亚太，AI投资回报引担忧

[music] Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts radio news. [music] Welcome to the Daybreak Asia podcast. I'm Doug Krer. We are seeing weakness in tech stocks across the Asia-Pacific after a rotation out of tech during the US session. That capital was redeployed into sectors like healthc care and real estate. for a look at what we're seeing in equity trading across Asia. Let's bring in Bloomberg's Winnie Sue. Winnie covers Asia stocks from our bureau in Hong Kong.

Thank you for being here. Lot to talk about particularly the negativity coming out of the US and how that's impacting markets in your region. There was the selloff in Alphabet and that came on concerns over returns on investment in AI. This has long been a concern for the market. I think the stock fell 12% in the US and then we heard from Intel after the bell. But can we start with the story on Alphabet?

It's not just about the weak earnings, the weak revenue, but also the continuous cash burn on the investment. So a similar story from Amazon that we saw was also about how much investment they're pouring into AI that plus how the the forecasts were quite disappointing in terms of kind of their quarterly sales going forward and then like you mentioned we also have Intel which also had very disappointing forecast. So all of this together showing two things right first there is this massive amount of investment into AI but at the same time we're really not seeing the returns coming back.

So the question here is already moving away from if this AI demand is going to continue or not to is this really sustainable given all the rising borrowing costs, the financing issues, the credit risks if we are actually going to be able to continue that spending and the concerns then trickle down into the supply chains in Asia, right? Because if we go to see the slowdown in the buildout of the infrastructure of these hyperscalers, then that can potentially mean that going forward we will need less from the chips or hardwares in Asia.

And that's why you're seeing sentiment really weak in these Asia chips PC names today.

Winnie, let's take a look at Intel now because the company gave a revenue forecast after the bell that was below estimates. I think it's fair to say this is a reflection of a big drop in demand for PC processors. And we should also point out the supply chain problems this company has been facing in the market for data center components, which to be fair is very lucrative. Intel also said that soaring memory prices are a major challenge and that could even be a bigger problem next year.

And I want to point out that in late trading in New York, Intel shares were down 23%. So obviously there are going to be repercussions across markets in Asia particularly in South Korea. Memory chip maker SKH down about 7%. Samsung is down by more than 7%. But you mentioned the supply chain issue and this was something that Intel really focused on. Right.

Yeah. So when it comes to supply chain, um obviously the high memory prices are still hurting the likes of Intel because they are the customers and they did site that as one of the key reasons why they're seeing the impact for uh their PC sales. But at the same time, that's also good news for some of these memory chip makers. Right? When you think about what we saw from SKH Highix's earnings, actually it's probably one of the perfect earnings that we saw, the very rare ones that we saw this week when it had sevenfold of um profit uh operating profit that beat estimate.

Then you have this massive shareholder return plan plus all these positive comments when it comes to how the memory shortage would likely going to continue in the coming years, how they're going to still continue to spend their money and that they have secured all these long-term agreements with their companies. And that stands in a very stark contrast uh to Samsung electronics where you didn't see much of a plan when it comes to shareholder return.

They said yesterday that this is going to be announced in January. So investors were quite unhappy about how there was the lack of information and that all these capital uh expenditure expansion that they're thinking about um is not necessarily being backed up by some of the um the more solid agreements. So that's why you're seeing bit of a divergence there. But overall, I think the set of memory results that we've been seeing so far at least point to how the demand is still there and that the shortage is still um the memory shortage is still one of the critical bottlenecks that we see.

So that will continue to be the trend. But we do have um Kioxia earnings from Japan today as well as China's CXMT. So that will also give us a better idea of the overall global memory chip demand and shortage.

So CXMT is a memory chip maker on the mainland. What do we know about how well they've been performing and whether or not companies have been looking because of this this bottleneck, this problem with with a lack of memory supply? Has in any way CXMT been a beneficiary?

Yeah, for sure. because it is really aggressively expanding their capacity and capability as well and it's seen as quite a strong competitor in the global memory chip space as it accounts for now about 10% of the global uh DRM revenue. So, so far for their preliminary earnings, what we've learned is that there is uh quite a jump when it comes to the year-over-year um growth. However, we're seeing a bit of a slowdown when it comes to the month over month.

So some of the key problems that this Chinese memory chip maker is facing is that um there are still some concerns in terms of potential export controls and if these US hypers skaters are actually going to be willing to sign contracts with the Chinese chip maker and also if despite their technological advancement and these new technologies that they have been uh pushing through if they are actually going to be able to manufacture at scale or not.

So at this point when it comes to how much of a big threat they are to these bigger memory chip makers that we've been talking about um the immediate threat is less compared to how long-term um it actually might be seen as a real competitor. But for sure we're seeing them growing at a very fast pace and there's so much interest from the investors and from all the other suppliers in the memory space as well.

So I want to get your take on what's going on in Taiwan. We know that obviously that is home to TSMC, the biggest foundry for semiconductors in the on the planet. How well is the Taiwan market been holding up? This is one of my most passionate topics because actually the Taiwanese market has been the best performing stock market so far this year up about 60%. And you know you were so we were also excited about how Korea has been doing well how Japan has been doing well but Taiwan has really been quite resilient amid all these global selloff that we recently seen in tech.

So of course just like the other markets it has lots of exposure to the AI supply chain. But what makes it so special is that it has a lot of these critical important um small components along the AI supply chain that are just um necessary for the buildout. So you're talking about small components like you know the the rail tracks that would hold up the AI data centers and in fact the company that made that the founder of that actually recently became a billionaire because uh the share prices jumped so much because all of these AI buildout cannot live without these components.

And so when it comes to hyperstators spending so much money to make their own ecosystem, that means all of these um things that the Chinese suppliers are making, whether it's from CPU to GPU to cooling systems, all of that is necessary. And that's why we're seeing lots of these smaller names in Taiwan jumping some 200% 300%. And I just want to point out one thing that when you think about the best performing stock market so far this year an