Memory Chips Are Completely Distorting South Korea’s Economy
Analysis: Memory Chips Are Completely Distorting South Korea’s Economy Create an FP account to save articles to read later.
Official response and confirmed impact
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In South Korea, the term byeorak-geoji means “sudden beggar.” In 2026, it has gained widespread popularity again. But its meaning is figurative.
Rather than denoting sudden bankruptcy or losing one’s life savings in the stock market, the term describes a new and widespread sense of relative deprivation: The realization that a colleague or acquaintance just earned years of your salary in a single month on paper.
Such anxiety is driven by a booming domestic semiconductor industry that has a stranglehold on the global artificial intelligence industry’s supply bottleneck: memory chips.
At the market’s peak this year, Samsung Electronics saw its market capitalization surge to a record high of $1.3 trillion, while SK Hynix has since reported a staggering 328 percent year-on-year increase in revenue in its latest third-quarter results.
The boom had led many Koreans to believe that borrowing to leverage into these companies offered the quickest and perhaps the only route to profits large enough to pay off their mortgages and secure homes.
