HK Stock Market Move | KB LAMINATES(01888) rises over 5%, signals of MLCC price increase have successively landed, Goldman Sachs points out that the entry barrier for core components may be significantly raised.

KB LAMINATES (01888) rose more than 5%, reaching 3.96% at the time of publication, closing at HK$49.32 with a transaction amount of HK$2.564 billion. In terms of news, since the release of the NVIDIA Rubin architecture in March this year, the MLCC (Multilayer Ceramic Capacitor) track has quickly become the focus of the capital market. It is reported that MLCC is the largest passive component on the PCB, maintaining a symbiotic relationship in product functionality. Huatai pointed out that the value of MLCC per unit cabinet driven by the Rubin architecture has surged from $3,000 in the H100 era to $22,000, and is expected to reach $40,000 by 2027, with a clear logic of rising quantity and price. On the supply side, the expansion of high-end MLCC production is squeezing the capacity of general-purpose products, and price increase signals have been successively implemented, with the logic highly consistent with HBM squeezing out DRAMs. Goldman Sachs believes that in the current AI server bill of materials cost structure, MLCC has risen to the third largest cost item, second only to GPUs and storage chips. In terms of competitive landscape, for the "low-voltage high-capacity" MLCC in AI servers adjacent to GPUs/ASICs, technological iterations are moving towards a dual-dimensional evolution of "achieving extreme miniaturization and ultra-high capacitance in extremely limited PCB board space", significantly raising the barrier to entry.