Kioxia Holdings: Better late, it seems
Given its credentials in the forefront of technology generally, it is something of a surprise that the Japanese economy appeared to be in danger of failing to tuck in to the global feast of the AI boom.
All that has changed with the late arrival on the scene of Kioxia, a memory chip maker that was spun out of Toshiba in 2018, and was puttering along quietly until its share price started exploding last year, crowning it as the best-performing stock on the MSCI world index.
Way back in 1980, in the Toshiba days, its engineer Fujio Masuoka invented flash memory, and the company has been making flash memory chips ever since. But they were viewed as a standard commodity, and as recently as 2024 the price of chips fell by half to record lows.
That picture has most definitely changed with the insatiable appetite for storage chips to train and operate large-scale AI models. Kioxia’s net profit in the three months to March hit ¥409bn, up from ¥13bn in the previous year.
The company has announced that it will be listing US depositary shares to make it easier for American investors to join the party, and it expects revenues to bounce by another 75% in the next quarter. To put its performance in a proper Japanese perspective, Kioxia’s earnings in the last quarter were higher than those of Toyota. And it is in a particular sweet spot with its NAND chips enjoying production costs that are around 25% lower than its competitors, as well as offering higher storage and faster speed.
QVC: Dinosaur advertising
Perhaps the biggest surprise in home-shopping channel QVC’s Chapter 11 filing was not that it was deciding to hoist the white flag, but that it still existed at all.
It’s a bit like going for a stroll in your garden and suddenly running into a diplodocus. Back in its heyday, there were millions of happy customers who would spend the evening glued to the TV watching some Z-list celebrity with enormous hair and even bigger shoulder pads persuading them to buy a revolutionary knife sharpener and a cheap fur coat, but those days are gone.
That sort of antediluvian advertising has been replaced by TikTok and YouTube and spookily accurate algorithms that somehow serve you up adverts for something you mentioned to your partner over dinner, and for everything else there’s Amazon.
QVC somehow still managed $9.2bn of sales last year, but it lost $47m in the first quarter of 2026 and it is sitting on debt of around $6bn, a burden that had clearly become unsustainable.
The company has been attempting to pivot towards digital, social and streaming platforms, and trying to cut costs wherever possible. But there’s a definite whiff of deckchairs on the Titanic about the whole affair.
There’s also a quality punch-up in the offing between groups of stakeholders, particularly those who are in the unhappy position of owning $1.4bn of QVC preferred stock and who are looking likely to get wiped out under the current restructuring plan. They have launched a protest aiming to get their hands on cash and a catalogue business, and the lawyers must be laughing.
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