In June 2026, semiconductor memory giant Kioxia overtook Toyota Motor in market capitalization to become Japan’s largest company by that measure—only for its stock price to crash to half that value just 48 days later. The source article points out that Kioxia posted record-high sales and operating profit for the April-June quarter, and argues that the stock’s drop should be considered separately from the actual state of the business. On 5ch, opinion was split: some pointed to operating profit topping ¥1 trillion as proof there’s “no way this company is finished,” while others noted that top shareholder Bain Capital sold off its entire stake in July, right before the crash, and that SK Hynix’s massive NAND production expansion raises the question of whether the results are just a temporary blip driven by market conditions.
9/12 (Sat) 7:15
President Online
In June 2026, semiconductor memory giant Kioxia overtook Toyota Motor in market capitalization to become Japan’s largest company by that measure. But 48 days later, its stock price had been cut in half. Is Kioxia now “finished”? Political scientist Ryuta Ito says, “We need to consider the reasons behind the stock drop separately from whether the underlying business has actually weakened. Sales and operating profit for the April-June quarter were both record highs, and it’s significant that some major IT companies have even proposed multi-year contracts with ‘advance payment’ terms.”
Source: topics.smt.docomo.ne.jp / Read the original article here
Sounds like President [magazine] is dodging the whole 'suckering in beginner investors' angle
trying to act like it never happened, that's how it looks to me.
Seems like AI is about to turn into a monster and bare its fangs at humanity, so maybe I'll lay low for a bit…
Maybe it's the yen that's finished
it's worth half what it was under the DPJ government.
Nope, they didn't.
Look at the shareholding ratio.
You know Takaichi revised the Foreign Exchange Act in 2026, right?
Now you need government approval
to hold shares in semiconductor companies.
Get what that means?
It means there's no way they'd sell to a rival company.
When it's climbing into the ¥100,000s, it's easy to buy.
When it's crashing down into the ¥30,000s, it's hard to buy.
Isn't ¥60,000-70,000 more like the fair price?
No way.
Kioxia's fair value is more like ¥2,000-3,000 a share.
Chinese AI: said its performance was great, but sorry, turns out it's just running on America's Claude AI 😎
Kioxia bagholders better sit tight and tremble waiting for Monday.
I kind of want a Black Monday to happen.
SK Hynix: ¥6.6 trillion, Kioxia: ¥1.2 trillion
And that's with DRAM being the tighter memory market—Kioxia's NAND-flash-only and still pulling this in.
Man, if only Japan had kept Elpida [DRAM maker] around too—corporate tax revenue this fiscal year probably would've come in well above the projected ¥5 trillion.
There must be some decent politicians out there
wouldn't hurt to give DRAM another shot.
The groundwork's there.
They might be flush with cash for now, but who knows what's around the corner.
That's just how cyclical stocks work. You shouldn't be looking at the P/E ratio—you need to look at the price outlook for whatever commodity they deal in.
It's similar to oil stocks. When crude goes nuts, profits go nuts too, but the company itself hasn't actually grown—once oil drops, things go right back to where they were.
Can't recall Kioxia paying out big bonuses (fitting, since 'kioku' means 'memory').
Feels like Samsung was handing out way bigger amounts though.
It's not so much 'overtaken'—Japan doesn't really have a memory company anymore. Kioxia is storage [NAND/flash].
Japan's Elpida got sold off to America's Micron.
I've only ever bought SanDisk and Micron lol
Because it went up more than it should have?
Even now it's still plenty high compared to where it started.
No idea about next year, but it doesn't look like they can keep up the same growth rate two or three years from now.
It's already priced in, plus the rate of price increases is slowing.
If prices go too high, demand drops, substitutes appear, and any company smelling profit ramps up supply—this time around, that's China.
Given that, nobody thinks prices are going to keep climbing at the current pace going forward. It's basically asking: after a 30x run in three years, is it going to 30x again from here?
This was my one and only investment this year.
Made a killing off it lol
So why the heck did it go up that much in the first place?
Because AI demand meant factories couldn't keep up with production of both memory and flash, so prices rose.
Companies also poured capital into ramping up production of the more profitable AI-use memory.
…that's what I posted on this board before the crash, but everyone was all 'Kioxia's just gonna keep climbing, this isn't a bubble.'
Humans really are foolish creatures.
Korea's Samsung and SK Hynix have their production lines tied up making high-margin HBM, so the SSD demand that was left uncovered spilled over onto Kioxia.
But Big Tech didn't buy the SSDs once they'd spiked in price—instead they bought up huge quantities of Western Digital's dual-actuator ('two read/write arms') high-capacity HDDs, which run about as fast as SATA SSDs anyway.
Meanwhile Apple partnered up with China's CXMT and YMTC, which sent Samsung and SK Hynix's stock prices crashing.
And the clincher: Bain Capital, which had been Kioxia's top shareholder ever since the 2018 buyout,
sold off its entire stake on July 9, 2026—right before the crash accelerated.
The stock had IPO'd at ¥1,455 and rocketed past ¥100,000;
Bain cashed out at essentially the peak, locking in about as huge a profit as you could ask for.
Then SK Hynix announced an ¥8 trillion mega-expansion of NAND production, and all the big money fled at once.
Kioxia isn't going back up.
Re: #179
It's just a pump-and-dump stock.
The 'momentum chimps' are simply getting fleeced.
Man, that's some seriously off-base nonsense you're spouting.
Kioxia actually makes products that sell in the real world, you know.
This isn't some fictional economy built on stock-market gambling.
Background and key points of this discussion
Kioxia began as Toshiba’s former memory business and went public in December 2023 with an IPO price of ¥1,455; its core business is NAND flash memory. This latest spike-and-crash played out against a backdrop of memory-market prices swinging wildly amid generative-AI demand. Some posts in the thread didn’t seem to account for the fact that DRAM (especially HBM)—where SK Hynix and others are strong—is a separate market from NAND, which is Kioxia’s mainstay. It’s also worth noting that the claim that top shareholder Bain Capital sold its entire stake right before the crash does not appear in the source article, so that detail remains unverified. The way operating profit is at the mercy of market conditions (the “silicon cycle”) has drawn comparisons to oil stocks, and opinion is split on whether this is just a temporary windfall or evidence of real structural strength.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “Kioxia overtook Toyota in market cap, then crashed—halving in 48 days. Is Japan’s new No. 1 really “finished”?“
