MONTHLY HIGHLIGHT - NOV 2025 Korea’s Momentum: Innovation, Markets, and Soft Power Align
- hubert116
- Nov 10
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 12
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During my visits to Seoul in May, August, and October, I hosted high-net-worth guests from the UK, U.S., and Europe who witnessed firsthand how Korea’s culture, technology, and capital are converging. From Myeong-dong’s vibrant beauty streets to behind-the-scenes tours at K-pop production studios, the creative economy is alive with global energy. Even amid export headwinds, Korean food, fashion, and media are expanding rapidly abroad, reinforcing Korea’s position as a cultural and consumer trendsetter.
A Market in Motion
South Korea’s stock market is experiencing one of its most dynamic years on record. The Kospi has risen over 66% in 2025, making it the world’s top-performing major index, driven by AI momentum, industrial contracts, and governance reforms.
Samsung Electronics is up nearly 90% YTD, with Q3 operating profit jumping 30% YoY to a three-year high.
SK Hynix has tripled, benefiting from soaring demand for high-bandwidth memory chips powering AI servers. Both companies recently signed supply deals with OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate project and NVIDIA’s new GPU cluster rollout in Korea, anchoring the global AI chip chain in Seoul.
Meanwhile, Hanwha Aerospace has surged nearly 300%, propelled by a $9.2 billion export deal with Poland and a $1 billion contract with Romania. HD Hyundai Heavy Industries is up over 110%, supported by global ship orders tied to LNG and naval upgrades.
The reform side of the story is equally powerful. Seoul’s Corporate Value-Up Program, pending dividend-tax cuts, and mandatory treasury-share cancellations are reshaping the investment landscape. The number of activist interventions has jumped tenfold since 2019, signalling a structural governance shift. Our portfolio company B-Side Korea is helping listed firms modernise with its digital proxy and e-voting platform, now integral to more transparent and efficient AGMs. Together, these moves are driving Korea’s long-awaited re-rating.
Industrial Tailwinds: AI, Defense, and Energy Transition
AI remains Korea’s core growth engine. With over 75% of global DRAM share, Samsung and SK Hynix sit at the heart of a supply chain now physically expanding in Korea under NVIDIA’s partnership rollout. The government’s semiconductor blueprint, five new advanced fabs and USD 230 billion in private investment over the next decade cements Korea’s role as the next-generation chip hub.
Defense exports are booming, and Doosan Enerbility has emerged as an industrial anchor beyond defense. Once focused on thermal power, it is pivoting toward small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), hydrogen turbines, and wind-turbine manufacturing, securing over KRW 9 trillion in new energy-infrastructure contracts this year. Its technology is now integral to Korea’s clean-power and export-reactor strategy, linking decarbonisation with heavy-engineering know-how.
Diplomatically, the landscape has improved. The U.S.–Korea tariff accord signed in October eliminates key duties on battery and chip components, boosting industrial cooperation. At the same time, Seoul and Beijing have reopened trade and travel channels after nearly five years of stagnation, restoring access for battery materials, EV supply chains, and Chinese tourists. These shifts give exporters and consumer sectors renewed tailwinds heading into 2026.
Culture Meets Commerce
Beyond factories and fabs, Korea’s lifestyle exports continue their ascent. K-beauty has overtaken France as Japan’s largest cosmetics import source for 12 straight quarters, with brands like Amorepacific and LG Household & Health Care rebounding 40–60% this year. Our portfolio company Aiden Lab is scaling into Japan, helping emerging K-brands build data-driven marketing and distribution models that convert cultural momentum into measurable growth.
Looking Ahead
Korea now stands at the intersection of AI technology, energy transition, defense manufacturing, and cultural exports, a combination few markets can match. The AI chip build-out, the renewed U.S. partnership, and an improving China relationship are redefining Korea’s economic trajectory from cyclical exporter to global innovator.
At Pine Capital Management, we remain deeply engaged with this transformation, on-the-ground visits, founder meetings, and cross-border investor dialogues. We’ll be hosting small-group “Investing in Korea” sessions this November and December in Singapore and Seoul to explore how global investors can participate in this next phase.
If you’d like to join or receive our materials, please reach out to me directly at ht@pinevp.com.
Hyuk-Tae Kwon
Founder and CEO
Portfolio Spotlight
Unlocking Value: How Igloo Home is Transforming Access Control in America's Rental Boom
by Investment Manager Joel Kam
The US rental market is experiencing unprecedented growth. Single-family rentals now house 14.2 million households, while multifamily properties added over 550,000 new units in 2024 alone. This expansion creates a mounting challenge: managing countless access points across aging infrastructure. With traditional access control systems averaging $2,500 to $4,300 per door to install, multi-family rental properties with just 50 access points faces over $125,000 in replacement costs, creating a painful dilemma between security needs and capital preservation.
Enter Igloo, a portfolio company we believe is uniquely positioned to capture this market inflection point. Their value proposition is elegantly simple yet powerful; Deliver enterprise-grade access control without the enterprise-grade capital expenditure.
The Software-First Revolution
Multifamily residences present a unique complexity. A single property might feature lobby doors from one manufacturer, garage systems from another, gate controls from a third, plus elevator systems requiring separate management. This fragmentation has historically locked property owners into costly, comprehensive overhauls when seeking unified control.
Igloo's iglooOS flips this paradigm entirely. As a software-first platform, it transforms existing third-party hardware regardless of brand into smart, centrally managed systems. Property managers can suddenly orchestrate gates, garage doors, lobby access, and even elevators through a single interface, all without replacing functioning equipment. The capital efficiency is remarkable: rather than six-figure hardware replacements, properties gain sophisticated access management for a fraction of the cost.
This isn't limited to common entry points. Their technology enables true "smart elevators" where landlords can dynamically control floor access which is crucial for managing amenity spaces, restricting access during events, or enhancing security protocols.
The Offline Advantage
What particularly excites us is Igloo's differentiation in offline functionality. While competitors rely on constant connectivity, iglooOS operates seamlessly without internet connection; a capability protected by defensible IP.
This positions Igloo beyond the obvious rental market opportunity. We envision substantial potential in defense installations, telecommunications facilities, and data centers, where security mandates often conflict with connectivity. These sectors demand robust access control while minimising cybersecurity attack surfaces; exactly where offline capability becomes invaluable.
The Journey Ahead
When we first invested, Igloo was a Singapore-based digital lock company. Today, they're pivoting their focus towards becoming a technology platform with the US as their primary market, serving a sector ripe for disruption. Their evolution from hardware to the iglooOS platform represents the kind of innovation trajectory we seek in portfolio companies.
The rental market's structural growth isn't slowing, and the capital-efficient infrastructure solutions will win. We're proud to support Igloo's mission and excited about the expanding applications ahead.
Lower yields, higher bar
by Investment Director Larry Lau
It has been an eventful 2025, to say the least. On the one hand, April’s unprecedented turn in the trade war prompted many investors (including us) to revisit economic history and examine the Trump administration’s trade strategy and negotiating playbook. On the other hand, the de-escalation of that very episode has taken the S&P 500 +20.6% above pre-“Liberation Day” levels. S&P 500 closed +2.3% higher in October, delivering a sixth consecutive monthly gain as the Fed cut rates to the lowest levels in three years. What a ride it has been!
Thankfully, the client portfolios we manage have meaningfully outperformed their benchmarks even after we raised cash to over 30% in mid-April. Those were testing times, but our process kept us nimble, prioritising capital preservation and mitigating left-tail risks. The higher cash level was a temporary drag on performance, yet the same process that turned us cautious (bearish market structure; a substantial rise in recession odds) also enabled us to redeploy quickly as the data started to improve.
A lesson from my analyst days remains central to our process – don’t anchor on narratives; instead, stay grounded in data. With the Shiller CAPE near levels last seen during the dot-com bubble, it’s easy to argue that valuations will “eventually have to correct", especially amid debate over the circular funding nature of recent AI mega-deals. That may well be true one day, but in this profession, being early often amounts to being wrong. We are more comfortable letting our framework guide asset allocation decisions than making “conviction market calls”.
We know our process won’t be right 100% of the time, but we believe the small edge it provides will compound over time. For example, we did not sidestep the S&P 500’s -2.71% decline on 10 October following Trump’s trade escalation with China. Instead, our process guided us to raise cash to ~10% on 16 October and return to fully invested by 22 October. Our average October cash level was 2.4%, allowing the portfolios to participate meaningfully in the rally and to deliver double-digit relative outperformance by month end.
As we wind down the year, the natural question on clients’ minds is our outlook for 2026. Predictions are notoriously difficult and the famous Wall Street quip comes to mind: “The first rule of financial forecasting is to give a number or a date but never both”. The short message is that we remain constructive and are buyers on dips, with our process guiding when to raise cash tactically on a day-to-day basis.
Rather than venturing a 2026 S&P 500 year-end target based on $X EPS and Y valuation multiple, we answer this in the context of our process. Our dashboard of leading and coincident data points to low recession odds through Q2 2026. We expect real GDP to reaccelerate into Q1 2026 from the +2.08% YoY pace in Q2 2025 before decelerating in Q2 2026. Headline inflation at +3.02% YoY as of September 2025 should begin edging lower from January 2026. This backdrop supports a constructive equity stance into Q1 2026, but we continue to let our process, not forecasts, determine positioning.
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