Aleabito digs into Korea's OE Solutions, a new EML laser hopeful, while reframing the supply-chain trade war
The stock-picker known online as @aleabitoreddit spent Saturday doing what he does most: tracing the obscure, upstream suppliers that the AI hardware boom quietly depends on. The headline item was a long, hedged research note on a little-known Korean optical company, bracketed by some macro and political commentary.
A trade-war reframe. He opened with a geopolitical argument: that the real leverage in modern trade disputes sits in frontier supply chains — AI, robotics, quantum — not consumer goods. He pointed to chokepoint suppliers clustered outside the US as evidence, naming ASML (the Dutch monopoly on EUV lithography machines, his benchmark for semiconductor "chokepoints"), Towa (the Japanese near-monopoly in the compression-molding gear used to package HBM memory, a core holding of his), and LPKF (the German glass-core substrate equipment maker he likens to "the ASML of advanced packaging"). His point: blanket tariffs on allies who control these monopolies were strategically self-defeating.
A NAND-style aside. In a lighter note, he joked that whey protein was seeing supply-driven price hikes reminiscent of his Sandisk (SNDK) thesis — the NAND flash memory maker he holds on the view that AI demand has tipped flash into a multi-year supply-constrained pricing "supercycle."
The main event: OE Solutions (138080). Responding to reader questions, he published initial research on OE Solutions, a small Korean optical-transceiver firm he likened to a "Korean AAOI." Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) is the US vertically integrated transceiver maker he holds; OE, he argued, is attempting the same full-stack build but centered on EML lasers — the electro-absorption modulated light sources that drive 800G/1.6T links. That EML capacity is scarce, controlled by a handful of players including his holdings Coherent (COHR) and Lumentum (LITE), the large-cap photonics incumbents he uses as quality benchmarks. He noted OE also has CPO-ready products using CW (continuous-wave) lasers, the light source for co-packaged optics, sampling in Q3.
His verdict was deliberately cautious. He sees genuine value — a 20-year-old company, low capacity utilization leaving runway before heavy capex, and EML/CW technology he thinks is worth more than the market cap if acquired by a vertical integrator. But he flagged the risks bluntly: no confirmed customers yet for the AI growth verticals, uncertain yield data, and an entire growth ramp that hinges on 2027–2028 execution. He called it materially higher-risk than his top photonics conviction, Sivers Semiconductor (SIVE) — the InP laser supplier he considers his single largest position — which he argues is already embedded with partners like Jabil (JBL), GlobalFoundries (GFS) and Ayar Labs. He disclosed a position in OE but framed it as too early, suggesting Q3–Q4 might be a more interesting entry once qualification data firms up.
Bottom line. No new buys or sells were signaled. Today was reconnaissance: scoping a sovereign-Korea EML/CPO contender while reaffirming SIVE as the higher-conviction, more de-risked play in the same supply chain.