[Featured Stock] Semiconductor Industry Improvement Expectations Boost Wonik QnC

As of 9:40 AM on the 14th, the stock price of Wonik QnC, a semiconductor materials and components company, is trading at 20,350 KRW, up 7.9% on the KOSDAQ market. This is likely due to expectations that semiconductor demand recovery will be faster than anticipated, along with upcoming events such as Micron's earnings announcement next week.

In the securities industry, there are forecasts that DRAM demand is recovering at a faster pace than initially expected. Accordingly, demand from major customers such as Samsung Electronics has been increasing since the beginning of the year, leading to an improvement in the market conditions for quartz, Wonik QnC's main product. BNK Investment & Securities projected that Wonik QnC's consolidated sales for the first quarter will be 219.5 billion KRW, with an operating profit of 18.4 billion KRW, showing slight improvement compared to the previous quarter.

There are also semiconductor-related events scheduled for next week. Micron Technology is set to announce its earnings on the 20th, which is expected to influence the direction of domestic semiconductor stocks such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. NVIDIA will hold the GTC 2025 event from the 17th to the 21st.

Subsidiary Momentive, which recorded a 10% operating loss rate in the fourth quarter of last year, remains a burden on the stock price. Minhee Lee, an analyst at BNK Investment & Securities, stated, "The improvement of Momentive, which has a growing impact on earnings, is not yet clear, resulting in lower recent stock price momentum compared to other component and materials stocks. We expect the earnings improvement trend to become clearer from the second quarter, when memory shipments are anticipated to recover."