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The day when Tesla got listed on the NASDAQ. Today, Tesla is worth $1.3 trillion.

A Guide by Serenity: How to Cripple the Western Hyperscaler buildout with just $170m. Just take over Nippon Chemical (4092) with $169m! For InP substrates, you need: Indium and High Purity Phosphorus. Thought $AXTI was a bottleneck? NCI is the bottleneck of the bottleneck. NCI is actually the leader of the high purity red phosphorus chokepoint holding 26-27% of the market share (Rasa has less share, then the rest is China). And they export to $AXTI, Sumitomo, JX that need it to make InP substrates. 
So… if you have $160m to spend to acquire NCI (plus Rasa as smaller capacity), you can remove the leading Western world’s production of 6N/7N red phosphorus needed to make InP substrates! And without InP substrates: no photonics. Fun fact: China’s tech companies would get pretty disrupted with it too by NCI. For $AXTI, the mapping/reliance is actually pretty interesting: - AXT's Tongmei outlined its structural reliance on importing high-purity precursor materials from Japan on their STAR Market listing 
- WITS data showing ~$460/kg high-purity phosphorus flowing from Japan into China So they secretly do depend on NCI. 
China does have capacity like Wylton Chemical, Qin Xi New Materials, Jinding Electronics, and Chuxiong Chuanzhi, Guizhou Wylton Jinglin Electronic Materials as well. However, they’re all smaller players so can’t make up for high purity red phosphorus capacity provided by NCI for InP substrate production at scale. $LITE CEO already said inp substrates keeps him up at night. So now with NCI, you can give the guy permanent insomnia? For just $169M. So here's what the supply chain looks like: -> DGC phosphate rock mine and ships it to NCI -> NCI refines Yellow Phosphorus into High Purity Red Phosphorus -> Sumitomo / JX / AXT melt the Red Phosphorus with Indium to grow InP Substrates -> $COHR / $LITE fab InP substrates into Lasers -> Innolight/Fabrinet package them into 800G/1.6T transceivers -> $NVDA / $GOOGL use them for ASIC/GPU clusters. 
And basically, the entire West depends on NCI to make InP substrates for photonics. I hold some very small positions, just for fun. However, Japan is not well known for price hiking. So you’d probably run into regulatory problems eg. FEFTA if you bought the company and hiked prices 15000% (like government seizing back the company once they realize)… Maybe 30-50% hikes is possible to compress fwd p/e? But very likely wont end up like $AXTI. 
 Regardless, this company is a massive, massive national security risk priced at ~$160m. As for fundamentals, they’re trading at .54 book value and a forward P/E of 11.4 so it’s probably undervalued anyway. TLDR: -> Is it the next $AXTI? No. -> Is it an unknown structural bottleneck + critical vulnerability of the Western hyperscaler buildout with photonics? Yes. -> Is there still room for re-rating? Just reverting to Book Value of 1 is immediate 80-85% upside. Maybe more if you give it multiples past 11 fwd p/e. Regardless, it’s fun to find a major point of failure in the hyperscaler supply chains for $169m.

$XFAB (photonics + power semis) is an interesting long idea at $1.28B MC, that I took positions in. Given EU CHIPS act 2 is today as the catalyst for European photonics players. > 800 VDC power semi exposure to $NVDA push through $NVTS + $POWI > Silicon Photonics / CPO exposure with $NVDA as evaluation stage for high volume manufacturing (optical transceivers/switches) > The only high-volume SiC foundry in the US. > One of the critical MEMS foundries > ~1.29 P/B, which was around what $SOI was sitting at when I went long. Depressed valuations due to legacy drag > ~6.5-8.5 fwd p/e 2028 personal est. > backstopped by Government: - EU CHIPS act, $128M Euros - US CHIPS act $50M PMT (department of commerce). With likely more coming (just signals critical importance to Western supply chains). So at a certain point with all the grants, they’re just getting the capex funded by the Governments. EU CHIPS act 2 is coming out this week, and I’m gonna go ahead and guess $XFAB might get included given they were before, and this package is specifically targeting photonics. ~$1.3B MC seems compelling to me if it can pull a Soitec reversal (low p/b, very high growth segments, auto legacy drag). As for the $NVDA silicon photonics relationships it’s under “photonixFAB”. Markets probably missed this silicon photonics relationship (like $TSEM when I went long) with Nvidia since XFab leads this… Just under a different name. For power semis, XFAB is named for SiC + $NVTS. In PCN-22181, $POWI explicitly names XFAB as its foundry.  Given its exposure to power semis and photonics as growth, low P/B, gov backstop (of course dyor, just sharing my personal thoughts) Thought it personally seemed compelling.

$WOLF was probably the most interesting one up there after restructuring. $LPKFF also for glass substrates and they own the laser induced deep etching at a $169m MC, so possibly most explosive 10x upside. $MTRN is probably the most stable one up there with decently high upside given it owns the mountain for ~65% of the world's Beryllium. There were a few others but just the fundamentals were either really bad or their bottleneck was too niche. $LPTH's bottleneck for example spreads across both defense, AI, drones, etc. $AXTI's bottleneck was so big and AI is such a big sector so it doesn't need to be spread across (but InP is used in a lot of other sectors too).

Elon and SpaceX are turning Science Fiction into Science Nonfiction right before our eyes. An incredible time to be alive.

congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight