Lee Nam-woo

Korea, like Japan and Germany, has a manufacturing-heavy, vertically integrated, capital-intensive corporate structure that creates boom-bust earnings cycles, and the market penalizes this with structurally lower valuations, with governance problems adding another discount. By contrast, the US has an asset-light, service- and innovation-driven model where earnings rarely decline and capital allocation is more dynamic, so US equities have generally deserved higher valuations; the speaker presents this as a relative preference for US equities over Korean equities.

Luckin Coffee's aggressive US expansion, mobile-app ordering, pickup model, and heavy discounting appeal to younger consumers and have begun competing directly with Starbucks in New York. Luckin is improving operationally, trades around 15x earnings, and is preparing to re-list on Nasdaq, while Starbucks has posted seven consecutive quarters of negative US same-store sales, sold its China stake, is down about 20% over five years, and trades around 36x earnings despite structural customer-traffic problems; the speaker concludes Starbucks must be more worried and faces a different, challenged business model.

Memory semiconductor stocks—Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and Micron—are cyclical, so valuation should be based on the estimated peak earnings of the current cycle rather than current or next-year consensus P/E. The speaker argues the current cycle may produce super-margins and a slower-than-usual downturn, meaning the market may not yet have reached peak earnings and high valuations could persist; the practical rule is to buy when P/E is high at the earnings trough and sell when P/E is low near the peak.