Korean retail investors refocused on Japan's semiconductor supply chain from Aug. 3 to 14, with Murata Manufacturing ranking first in net purchases at about $5.319 million and Tokyo Electron second at about $2.262 million. Arisawa Manufacturing and Micronics placed third and fourth, and six of the top 10 net purchases were semiconductor or electronic parts names worth about $14.367 million in total, equal to 73% of the top-10 net buying. The shift marked a reversal from July, when Korean retail buying had spread into financial stocks and Mitsubishi UFJ briefly topped net purchases, but the bank has now fallen out of the top 50 as money moved back into Japanese chip suppliers; in the top 20, supply-chain companies including Fujikura and Renesas Electronics also featured heavily. Kioxia rebounded about 16% after falling about 48% in July, with its share price rising from 46,500 yen at the end of July to 53,740 yen on Aug. 14, but the stock also saw clear profit-taking: it had climbed to sixth in net purchases with about $970,000 bought by Aug. 13, yet the cumulative Aug. 3-14 tally showed about $3.745 million in net sales, the second-largest net sell figure. Sentiment was supported by expectations that AI investment would spread across the full memory chain, after Kioxia and SanDisk jointly unveiled ninth-generation 2Tb QLC flash (NAND storage using four bits per cell) aimed at AI and data-intensive applications, and SanDisk told an investor event it was targeting average annual sales growth from the mid-to-high single digits to around 15% in fiscal 2028 to 2030, with high-bandwidth flash for AI inference (running trained AI models) as a growth engine. Asian markets have recently strengthened in tandem, and Korean retail investors are selectively adding to Japanese semiconductor supply-chain stocks while cashing in part of the positions that have already rebounded sharply.