Dirk Donovan

@Aesalerte Crazy disinformation

🇲🇱 AUJOURD’HUI, TOUS LES NOIRS DOIVENT ÊTRE FIER DU MALI Quand les terroristes financés par l’Occident ont lancé une attaque tous azimuts afin de submerger les défenses du Mali et de prendre la ville de Kidal, les citoyens de la ville de Kidal ont surpris les terroristes les mains VIDES ou avec ce qu’ils avaient sous la main, contre des djihadistes bien armés. Je n’ai jamais vu cela auparavant. Cela restera dans l’histoire comme l’un des actes collectifs les plus héroïques de tous les temps.

@Veeshalnarote12 @LinQingV @ponyoonthebeach @jukan05 Its not a matter of whining. It violates WTO agreements almost plainly. Samsung is the one that's damaged the most, not an American company.

@LinQingV @ponyoonthebeach @jukan05 As soon as American companies start losing, all the "Free Marketiers" and Capitalists start whining abt how the Communists are unfairly winning

Jukan (@jukan05) wrote a sharp memo on how the US let China's display industry grow unchecked while drawing the line at semiconductors. The strategic analysis is right. But there's a second layer he didn't touch, and it matters more if you actually invest in this space. China's display industry won. Its shareholders lost. And the same pattern is about to replay in memory. BOE controls 25% of the global display panel market. Revenue approaching $29 billion. Net margin: 2.7%. ROE: 3.1%. The stock has gone nowhere for years. Jukan's point is that the US made a mistake by not sanctioning China's display equipment imports the way it sanctioned semiconductor equipment. He's correct. BOE bought the same tools from Applied Materials that Samsung used. No CFIUS review, no Entity List, no restrictions. The result is exactly what he describes. China now holds 70% of global LCD production and just crossed 50% of OLED shipments. Korea is hanging by a thread. But here's what the geopolitical framing misses. Even inside China, the winners of this industrial war weren't the display companies themselves. The value destruction mechanism has four moving parts. First, the capex treadmill. A single Gen 8.6 OLED line costs $4-9 billion. BOE's latest Chengdu fab alone is $8.7 billion. The moment one investment cycle finishes, the next generation demands even more. Profits never accumulate. They get recycled into the next fab before shareholders see a cent. Second, perpetual dilution. Every fab requires massive equity raises, JV structures with state-owned partners, and government co-investment. BOE's share count has expanded enormously over two decades while earnings-per-share growth has been negligible. The pie grows, but each slice keeps getting thinner. Third, the principal-agent problem. BOE's six largest shareholders are SOEs from Beijing, Chongqing, and Hefei. Their KPI is employment, industrial upgrading, and supply chain control. Return on equity was never the objective. When the people running the company don't care about stock returns, the stock doesn't return. Fourth, self-inflicted overcapacity. Four Chinese firms are building Gen 8.6 OLED lines simultaneously. They compete on price against each other, not just against Samsung. Panel prices recover, producers ramp utilization, prices crash again. BOE's gross margin sits at 14%. Even at the top of the cycle, current prices barely keep panel makers above break-even. Market dominance and shareholder value destruction, simultaneously. The industry won. The stocks lost. Now watch CXMT and YMTC. CXMT is pursuing a STAR Market IPO at roughly $42 billion valuation, raising $4.2 billion. YMTC plans to list in H2 2026. CXMT posted cumulative losses exceeding 30 billion yuan across 2022-2024, then reported its first profitable year in 2025, timed perfectly for the IPO window, during the hottest memory supercycle in years. Check the four forces against them. Capex treadmill? CXMT plans to expand from 200,000 to 300,000 wafers per month this year, then to 400,000. The IPO proceeds of $4.2 billion are earmarked almost entirely for fab expansion and R&D. Not a dollar returns to shareholders. YMTC is breaking ground on its third Wuhan fab, targeting production in 2027. Perpetual dilution? CXMT's IPO alone issues 10.62 billion new shares. This is round one. Scaling to 400,000 wafers requires tens of billions more in capital that doesn't exist yet. More raises will follow. Principal-agent misalignment? CXMT was founded by the Hefei government. YMTC is a creation of Tsinghua Unigroup and the National IC Fund. The controlling interest is the state. The mission is memory self-sufficiency, not EPS. Self-inflicted overcapacity? Both are scaling aggressively at the same time. UBS estimates Chinese memory capacity expansion could reach 120,000-140,000 additional wafers per month in 2026, with further increases in 2027. When this capacity hits the market, commodity DRAM and NAND pricing will compress. Samsung and SK Hynix will respond with price cuts in segments where their fabs are fully depreciated. CXMT and YMTC, running brand-new fabs with heavy depreciation, get squeezed hardest. Jukan asks whether the West's semiconductor hegemony will last. That's the right question at the geopolitical level. At the investment level, the question is different. Even if CXMT and YMTC succeed in displacing Samsung and Micron from commodity memory segments, their shareholders will likely suffer the same fate as BOE's. The pattern is structural, not accidental. When the state's objective is industrial displacement and the industry requires perpetual multi-billion-dollar reinvestment, market dominance and shareholder value destruction travel together. So how do you actually profit from this? You don't buy the miners. You sell them pickaxes. Every dollar CXMT raises in its IPO, every dollar of government subsidy flowing to YMTC, a significant portion ends up as revenue for semiconductor equipment suppliers. These companies capture the capex regardless of whether the end customer ever earns a return on its fabs. Three names sit at the center of this flow. Naura Technology is China's largest equipment maker, now ranked sixth globally. Revenue growing 30%+ annually, net margins around 17%, ROE of 17%. That margin profile is six times BOE's. The product portfolio spans etch, PVD, CVD, ALD, furnaces, and cleaning. AMEC is China's etch specialist, founded by a former Applied Materials executive. Revenue expected around 12.4 billion yuan in 2025, up 37%. Etching tools deployed across more than 100 production lines. R&D intensity runs at 30% of revenue, aggressively expanding from etch into thin-film deposition. ACM Research focuses on cleaning and electroplating. Smaller and more specialized, but cleaning is one of the most repeated process steps in memory manufacturing. Dual-listed on STAR Market and Nasdaq. The asymmetry is clean. CXMT and YMTC will spend tens of billions building fabs. Their shareholders will be diluted, margins will compress, and the cycle will punish them. The equipment suppliers earn 17% margins selling the tools that build those fabs, cycle after cycle. One risk. Naura was added to the US Entity List in December 2024. If Washington extends restrictions to Chinese equipment makers more broadly, the thesis gets complicated. And none of these trade cheaply. Naura sits at 52x earnings. But the structural logic holds. In the display industry, the correct trade was never BOE. It was the companies selling BOE the tools to build its fabs. The same logic applies to memory today. Jukan is right that China's display dominance is a cautionary tale for the West. For investors, the cautionary tale is different. The industry succeeds. The value just accrues somewhere else in the chain.

@TwinTurboCe1ica the benefit of having a committed partner who wants to participate in a project in a more meaningful way. i see this as a clear positive.

But African miners they said…. It will be fun they said….

Your comments are mostly a diversion and incomplete story telling. 1. There isn't any reason to enrich to 60% other than pursue weapons grade. 2. While it may have been a mistake to tear up the JCPOA agreement, it was in fact a terrible deal that flooded Iran's proxies with cash. It did nothing to address Iran's activities. 3. You completely ignore Iran's repeated statements to pursue genocide against Israel -- while enriching uranium towards weapons grade. I won't respond further to any of your comments as they are just a meandering time waster.

@DonovanDirk @YourAnonNews @marcorubio No one is disputing they enriched Uranium to 60%. Trump ripped up the JCPOA which Iran was abiding by, Iran enriched to 60% for leverage in future negotiations. The IAEA you sourced said that “we did not have any proof” of Iran building a nuclear weapon. truthout.org/articles/iaea-…

The IAEA, the UN nuclear watchdog group, independently verified that Iran enriched uranium to 60%. So no, it was not the same excuse for the last 30 years. It was completely different with independent fact checking, unlike Iraq, and the Iranian Ayatollah openly telling the world Israel must be destroyed.

@marcorubio There is no proof of them trying to get nuclear weapons, and you've all used the same excuse that was used for the past 30 years. What does that make you? Liars.

@Fried_rice I'm sure they are just trying to stimulate buzz for their upcoming IPO.

Claude code source code has been leaked via a map file in their npm registry! Code: …a8527898604c1bbb12468b1581d95e.r2.dev/src.zip

Iran spends ~30% of its national budget on defense/security. They probably spend ~10% of their entire budget annually on funding proxies: Houthis, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. The US spends ~16% and has security/military obligations that far exceed its local region. If the US spent $600 B (10% of the federal budget) a year funding Israel's military, people would go insane.

US does not have a Defense Department, just a War Department US “defense” budget $919 B, just asked for $200 B additional Iran defense budget $25 B

@fastfish3 @Jkylebass pretty wacky take

People are all talking about inflation, that disappears immediately after the war is over (as soon as Hormuz is open). As soon as the armistice happens, all the talk turns to deflation and recession. The FOMC will lower rates (except that Powell want to turn the knife into Trump before the midterms, so he will delay as long as possible).

Global markets are vastly underestimating the severity of what’s unfolding. It’s worth considering how the economies of Europe and Asia will cope with imminent shortages of food, fuel, and medicine. Brent crude futures seem to be pricing in a quick return to normalcy.

@offshoremayor @SheDrills @trend_bullish Makes sense. What I don't get is why they don't blockade any Iranian ships coming out of the Strait. They don't need to take Kharg island, they can just interdict any ships leaving the Strait.

That will never happen. So much traffic that supports the Navy runs in and out of Hormuz in order to resupply in Bahrain. US would essentially lose access to the whole middle east. I would go in and out of Hormuz every 2 months. This more than likely means he’s doing a ground invasion over the weekend, ha.

The thought that the US escalated a conflict situation that resulted in the Strait closing then might simply “take their ball and go home” leaving the region in crisis is absolutely incredible. We are playing global economic crisis roulette.

@sidprabhu Nothing worse than an enabler who says, "I tried to warn you," after the fact.

Nobody has done more to enable this than Jerome Powell with his Covid fiscal cheerleading and irresponsible QE

@JosephGelman @sentdefender OK. I guess we are randomly combining the local security obligations of US and Israel. So when is Israel going to have boots on the ground on the US Southern border w/ Mexico to deal with drug cartels, which have been designated foreign terrorist organizations (FTO)?

Is the US going to be providing boots on the ground against the Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon? No, Israel is, and Israelis are the only ones dying there. So far the US hasn’t put a single boot on the ground, and Israel has been doing the bulk of targeted air strikes in Iran and Lebanon. You sound like a crybaby.

Quick reminder that none of these countries, nor Israel, is going to provide significant, if any, troops towards an Invasion of Iran. The only ones dying will be Americans.

@CitizenVMachine @GovPritzker Covid funding from federal government + inflation = JB coasting by w/o having to do major financial surgery.

Illinois' budget stability (if you can call it that) under @GovPritzker is entirely the byproduct of JB having the highest state income tax rate of any IL governor ever. $3 billion more per year than Rauner and Quinn. $8 billion more than Ryan and Edgar.

@llzwjll @AnnaEconomist 1. he's past the point of no return on the mid-terms. we are way past that point now. 2. he thinks can still win vs. Iran by taking Kharg and the alternative is to walk away with an "L" anyway

@AnnaEconomist but it means a death for trump's mid term election, so why he would do？

I am not a geopolitical analyst. But my guess (which is as good as anyone’s) is that Trump will escalate. And there will be a point in the next two months when oil will reach $150-$200.

@AnnaEconomist seems inevitable that they escalate. Rubio just prepping the Europeans for how this will play out.

it's really bad. but it's not quite this bad. i hate to be that crazy guy ranting on the internet about "George Soros", but his funding of DA Kim Foxx, ultimately led to degradation of penalties/fines/enforcement for the kind of craziness you are describing. she completely rolled back prosecution and enforcement on 'trivial' crimes, and that led to just "anything goes" on the transit system. people smoking marijuana in closed transit cars, crapping on the floor of the train, even near kids. it's crazy really.

I believe that the majority of people don’t fully grasp the condition of two of Chicagos most important public transportation lines(the Red and Blue lines). In four years time there was never a week that went by where I wasnt harassed by a drug addled homeless person a minimum of 3-4 times. At 5:00 a.m. the business people on the platform all try and run to the least worst car. The trick is to avoid cars with tons of homeless people but the most important thing is to stay far away from a car that has nobody on it. An empty car usually means the excrement smells is so bad that even the homeless inhabitants cant stand it. Once a month I was kicked off a car for a “medical emergency” which was code for a death from overdose…but the single worst thing is being on a car where everyone suspects that there’s a dead body but no one says anything because they don’t want to have to get a $100 uber home for the second time that week…this is not one word of exaggeration…

@johnarnold If you think that's bad, spend an hour or two looking at the City of Chicago specifically.

I can’t believe New York State has a $10 bln deficit, NYC is facing its own $10 bln FY27 deficit, and 31 school districts are designated to be in fiscal stress and yet the state legislature is seriously considering doing this.

@PoliNewsDaily_ @realJoelFischer @grok When the ship passes over the double power up rune, then it gets real

@realJoelFischer @grok is this real?

An Iranian plane VS a US ship. I can watch this all day 😂

@DiscountedTr > looks like he must be about 5’2” wut ?

@AndrewRangeley They are getting smarter. When new models come out, I would often ask a few nonsensical questions or brain teasers, like the one below. All models used to blow this question, parts of which make no sense. But Gemini and ChatGPT catch it now.

AI continues to blow my mind, but sometimes the gaslighting is comical (FIG went public last July)

@alz_zyd_ Your math is wrong. About 15% of the Harvard incoming freshman class are foreigners that don't come from US high schools. There for the ratio is more like 1/2700 or 1400 US students to 3.8 million graduating US high schoolers.

You might think Harvard is hard to get in. But: - Harvard admits 1/2000 of the graduating US high school class - Tsinghua university admits around 1/3500 of the Chinese graduating class - École normale supérieure admits around 1/3750 of the French graduating class