Quant chart: Asian hardware stocks show big gains and big swings

As the largest US technology companies pour billions into AI infrastructure, much of that spending flows through Asia’s hardware supply chain. Taiwan sits at its center, with Korean companies also supplying essential memory, components and manufacturing capacity.

Across the 51 stocks shown in Figure 1, the median one-year return was 173%. Yet the median decline from a recent high was 23%. While twenty stocks gained at least 200% over the year, seven were 40% or more below their recent peaks. As our chart shows, the market still looks exceptionally strong over 12 months, but much less uniform close up.

The scatter makes that divergence visible. MediaTek², ASE Technology and Global Unichip, three sizable companies at the heart of the AI boom, remained within 5% of their recent highs, supported by order growth and earnings momentum. LG Innotek, LG Electronics, Yageo and Walsin were more than 50% below their peaks, despite positive one-year returns for all four.

The ten-step framework in Figure 2 helps explain the spread. AI hardware moves from chip design through foundries, memory, substrates, packaging and testing, and then into networking, power and cooling, components, boards and complete servers. Companies at each stage face different demand cycles, competitive pressures and starting valuations. Exposure to the same spending boom can therefore produce very different earnings and share-price outcomes.

For investors, identifying an AI beneficiary is only the starting point. The harder question is how much future growth the share price already reflects. A healthy AI business can still disappoint when expectations move too far ahead of earnings. Strong earnings revisions, by contrast, can support further gains after a large rally.

Robeco’s emerging markets quant strategies seek to capture these differences through many bottom-up stock-level decisions, while keeping overall country and sector exposures balanced. Indeed, so far in 2026, technology stock selection has contributed positively without an overall overweight to AI-related names.

Footnotes

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²Companies named and shown are for illustrative purposes only. No inference can be made about their future development. This is not a buy, sell or hold recommendation.