Isupetasis Hits New High Again After 8 Months, Foreigners and Institutions 'Buy'

Surpassing Last July's All-Time High of 43,300 Won
Foreigners and Institutions Continue Net Buying This Month... Up 43%

Isu Petasys has reached an all-time high again after 8 months. As more companies adopt artificial intelligence (AI) to increase productivity, expectations are growing that the demand for AI accelerators produced by Isu Petasys will also increase.

According to the Korea Exchange on the 28th, the stock price of Isu Petasys reached 44,800 won at one point during the previous trading day. This surpassed the 43,300 won recorded on July 25 last year. The stock price has risen 43.2% since the beginning of this month. Foreign and institutional investors led the price increase by net buying 1.99 million shares and 730,000 shares, respectively.

Isu Petasys, a manufacturer of multi-layer substrates (MLB), produces ultra-high-layer MLBs used in AI accelerators and network equipment. AI server shipments increased from 1.18 million units in 2023 to 1.5 million units in 2024. As companies across various industries begin to actively adopt AI, the AI ecosystem is rapidly expanding. KB Securities forecasts that corporate AI-related investment will grow at an average annual rate of 17% over the next five years. It expects the related market to reach $150 billion (approximately 202 trillion won) next year.

Kim Dong-won, a researcher at KB Securities, explained, "Assuming the purpose of adopting AI is to win the productivity competition, the number of AI models will explode," and "Because it is difficult to export corporate data externally, AI trained separately based on data held by each company will be created." He added, "The scale of data learned by OpenAI's ChatGPT is more than 3,000 times smaller," and "By next year, the data size held by large corporations will increase to about 65PB (petabytes, 1024TB)."

As the AI market related to companies rapidly expands, Isu Petasys is increasing its production capacity. Kim So-won, a researcher at Kiwoom Securities, explained, "Since 2022, the production capacity has been operating at full capacity," and "New facilities have been actively operated since the second half of last year." She added, "After expansion, production capacity increased by about 50% compared to before," and "It can record annual sales of about 950 billion won or more on a consolidated basis."

Kwon Tae-woo, a researcher at KB Securities, also analyzed, "To respond to the rapid growth of the AI market, we plan to expand order volume from the second quarter," and "With the full-scale operation of the new 4th factory expected in the second half of this year, structural growth will be possible." He also predicted, "Hyperscalers and cloud service companies expanding data center network capacity will switch from existing 400G to 800G switches to increase data processing speed in the AI server market." He explained, "Isu Petasys supplies high-value-added products with more than 35 layers to major customers," and "This will have a positive impact on profitability improvement going forward."

Global AI server shipments are expected to reach about 1.5 million units in 2024, a 27% increase compared to 1.18 million units in 2023.