Hanwha Asset Management said on the 4th it will newly list the "PLUS SK hynix SanDisk Bond Mix 50" ETF.
This product holds SK hynix and SanDisk at 25% each, with the remaining 50% invested in nine Treasury bond issues. It is designed to track the growth potential of memory chips amid the spread of artificial intelligence (AI) while reducing stock-investment volatility by including bonds.
Under retirement pension supervision rules, it is classified as a non-risk asset, so it can be invested in from defined contribution (DC) retirement pensions and individual retirement pension (IRP) accounts without being subject to risk-asset limits. Because it is an ETF that includes overseas assets, investing through a pension account defers taxation, and lower tax rates can apply when receiving the pension later.
Hanwha Asset Management noted the AI industry bottleneck could shift from graphics processing units (GPUs) to memory and storage. While GPUs were the core infrastructure in the AI training phase, the importance of high bandwidth memory (HBM) and DRAM is growing as inference demand increases, it said. It also projected that as AI agents spread, demand will rise in tandem for NAND flash and enterprise solid-state drives (eSSD), which store and retrieve large-scale data.
SK hynix holds the No. 1 market share in HBM and ranks No. 2 in the DRAM market. SanDisk is a storage-memory company focused on NAND flash and enterprise eSSD. Hanwha Asset Management said both companies generate most of their revenue from memory chips, allowing the AI memory cycle to be reflected directly.
Kim Jeong-seop, head of the ETF Business Division at Hanwha Asset Management, said, "The PLUS SK hynix SanDisk Bond Mix 50 ETF captures the AI memory cycle directly through two corporations purely focused on memory chips, while taking volatility into account with 50% in Treasury bonds," adding, "It should be highly useful for investors who found it hard to increase their semiconductor allocation in retirement pensions due to risk-asset limits."