Analysts pushed back on the scale of the competitive threat as the losses deepened. Goldman Sachs highlighted SK Hynix and Samsung as offering attractive risk and reward, arguing the market overestimated how much China had closed the technology gap. KB Securities estimated the DRAM process gap between South Korean chipmakers and CXMT remains five to seven years, noting that production yields, cost and customer qualification matter more than a product preview, while Rosenblatt called the near term threat a "paper tiger" given US export restrictions on advanced EUV lithography tools.
Liu Yang, deputy head of research at Shenwan Hongyuan Securities, told Chosun Biz that China trails South Korea by about two years in conventional DRAM and at least three years in high bandwidth memory due to lithography bottlenecks. At the same feature size, a 4F² cell layout uses roughly 33% less area and offers 50% higher theoretical cell density than a 6F² design, though Samsung's chief technology officer said at the SEDEX conference that South Korea's major chipmakers are developing 4F² technology of their own for mass production later this decade.