Mohnish Pabrai — Korea, the memory oligopoly & hated-and-unloved investing

Reysas is a Turkish company that builds and rents out warehouses — it's the biggest warehouse landlord in Turkey, with about 1.2 million square metres leased almost entirely (99%) to blue-chip tenants like Amazon, IKEA, Mercedes and Toyota, on leases that automatically rise with inflation. Pabrai found it seven years ago when Turkey screened as the cheapest stock market in the world: the whole company could be bought for about $16 million even though selling off its buildings ("liquidation value") would have fetched ~$800 million. He describes it as buying a million-dollar apartment for $20,000.

He ran his checklist, confirmed there was no debt and that the buildings could survive a major earthquake (with insurance), and bought steadily until he owned 40% of the company. It's now worth about $1.5 billion. His plan is simply to never sell — "we're just going to own it forever" — as long as the founding father and his 41-year-old son keep running it well. It's his textbook "heads I win, tails I don't lose much" holding.

Berkshire Hathaway is Warren Buffett's company — a huge, cash-rich collection of businesses and stocks with essentially no debt. When asked what a beginner should do with $1,000, Pabrai's answer is Berkshire (ticker BRK.B): "no leverage, lots of cash, very good management, very deep moat, very boring, very hated and unloved."

That "boring" is the whole point. He tells people to get their excitement from life, not the stock market — put savings somewhere dull and durable, add to it every month, and leave it alone for decades so compounding works. Berkshire, like a broad index fund, is a "set it and forget it" home for that money.

SK Hynix is one of only three companies in the world that make computer memory chips (the others are Samsung and Micron). Pabrai loves the business: memory used to be a brutal 20-player price war where nobody made money, but it consolidated down to three, and now it's nearly impossible for a fourth to break in — you'd need to violate patents, poach scarce senior engineers, and spend 10-20 years, and even then some of the manufacturing is "black magic" that can't easily be copied. With AI demand booming, the three can't make enough, so they're "selling the pickaxes in the gold rush."

But he's careful not to tell people to pile in now. His stance is: if you already own it, don't sell; if you don't own it, don't buy — "the party has only just started" but chasing it here isn't his style. He admits he broke his own never-sell rule by selling his memory stakes and regrets it.

Samsung Electronics is the largest of the three memory-chip makers and a giant weight in Korea's stock index. The investment logic is the same as SK Hynix: a once-terrible commodity business has become a protected three-player club with a real moat, riding the AI-driven shortage of memory.

Pabrai's advice is identical too — this is a "hold, don't chase" name. If you already own Samsung, keep it; if you don't, he wouldn't start buying at these levels, even though he thinks the good times for memory have only just begun.

Hyundai is Korea's big carmaker and, in Pabrai's words, a "fabulous business" and export powerhouse. The problem isn't the company — it's the country's math. Korea's population is shrinking fast, which pushes wages up sharply, so it's now cheaper for Hyundai to build a car in Alabama than at home, and production keeps shifting to the US, China and India.

So he rates it a quality operator fighting a structural headwind rather than a clear buy: a good company whose home base is getting more expensive to run in.

Micron is the American member of the three-company memory-chip oligopoly, alongside Samsung and SK Hynix. Pabrai uses it to explain just how deep the moat is: Micron's own management told him that even if a factory ("fab") burned down and they still had every patent, engineer and builder, they aren't sure they could rebuild it at the same cost and output — some of the process is "black magic." That's how hard it is for anyone new to enter.

As with the Korean two, his stance is hold-don't-chase. He owned Micron, sold it against his own never-sell rule, and openly regrets it — a caution to keep the winner rather than a fresh buy signal.

Amorepacific is Korea's leading skincare and cosmetics company — and Korean skincare is envied worldwide, so it has done very well. But Pabrai uses it as his example of a shallow moat. Beauty is a brutally competitive market: countless rivals keep attacking, and customers are never satisfied — they always want the next, newer, better treatment.

His point is that a great product without a durable, hard-to-copy brand advantage can still struggle over time. So despite its success, he'd be cautious owning it as a long-term investment — it fails his "durable moat" test.

SpaceX is Elon Musk's rocket company, still privately held but with a much-hyped stock-market listing (IPO) expected to be one of the biggest ever. Pabrai brings it up as the opposite of a recommendation — the next "shiny object."

His observation about crowd behaviour: money chases whatever is most loved. People dumped Bitcoin to buy AI when AI became the hot thing (Bitcoin fell from ~$100k to ~$70k); next, he predicts, they'll sell AI to buy the SpaceX IPO. His advice is to do the reverse — avoid whatever is loved and hyped, and buy what is "hated and unloved" instead.