The most interesting opportunities in markets often hide in plain sight—either inside a sprawling conglomerate whose individual strengths are obscured by its size, or inside a fallen favorite that the market has temporarily written off. Two companies illustrate this principle especially well today: Samsung, a South Korean technology giant priced as though it were a commodity manufacturer, and PayPal, a payments pioneer trading well below what its underlying franchises appear to be worth. Both reward the kind of investor who pays close attention to price, because, as the old discipline goes, it is almost all about the price.
Samsung: A Commoditized Past, A Strategic Future
It is easy to think of Samsung as merely a rival to Apple in phones and mobile devices, but that framing badly undersells what the company actually is. Samsung is one of the global leading technology companies, with several distinct businesses that each carry real strategic weight. The fact that it recently announced the relocation of its North American headquarters to Texas is a small but telling sign of how deeply embedded it intends to become in the future of American technology manufacturing.
The heart of the bull case lies in memory. For decades, the memory business—shared with players like Micron and SK Hynix—was a cyclical, commoditized industry, the kind of business where prices swung wildly and margins were thin. That story has fundamentally changed. Memory has become a critical bottleneck in the entire AI infrastructure buildout. It was essential to training the large models, and as the industry pivots toward inference, the demand only intensifies, because inference is even more memory-intensive than training. The trend is broadening, too: AI PCs are now arriving, and beyond computers, an ever-widening universe of devices—cars, refrigerators, and countless others—will need memory to communicate and interoperate in this new world. Memory is becoming genuinely ubiquitous, and Samsung sits at the center of that demand.
The second pillar is the foundry business, where Samsung manufactures chips for others. Taiwan Semiconductor remains the market leader, but Samsung is a close second, and that position matters enormously when the world has so many chips left to make. Foundry work represents some of the most precise manufacturing on the planet. Samsung has committed around $20 billion, with more to follow, to put a foundry operation into the ground in Texas—a US-based facility that is strategically important precisely because of the geopolitical fragility of concentrated chip production. This leg of the business will take a good while to turn profitable, but it is an important part of the overall structure, a third leg of the stool that strengthens the whole.
What makes the investment compelling is the combination of these strengths with the price. For value-minded investors, price is the discipline that governs everything, and Samsung offers an unusual entry point. By owning the company through its preferred shares—a quieter route to the same underlying value—an investor can effectively own a global technology leader at something like three to four times cash flow. Given the company's forecasts and the steady progress it has made in launching new products, there is good reason to believe Samsung still has a long way to run from here.
PayPal: A Bargain Born of Bad News
If Samsung represents undervalued strength, PayPal represents the opposite kind of opportunity: a company that has fallen out of favor and traded down hard, creating the conditions in which bargains appear. Markets that are changing rapidly tend to punish stumbling companies severely, and PayPal has stumbled. It delivered a disappointing earnings report and replaced its chief executive in February, and the stock dropped roughly 30% over a couple of days. For an investor focused above all on price, that kind of dislocation is exactly where to look.
Beneath the bad headlines, the franchise retains real durability. The legacy "button" business—the familiar PayPal checkout experience embedded across online retail—is remarkably sticky. Once consumers have stored their information and grown comfortable with the interface, they tend to stay. Layered on top of that is Venmo, with something on the order of 100 million users, a growing asset that could become one of the central stories driving PayPal's future rather than merely a feature of its past.
There is also a powerful alignment of incentives at the top. The new chief executive received a large performance stock unit grant whose payout depends on where the stock trades. To reach even the base case of his compensation, the shares need to climb something like 60%. That structure ties the leadership's personal reward directly to the recovery shareholders are hoping for—a clean alignment of interests that is itself a reason for confidence.
The Common Thread
Taken together, these two cases reflect a single underlying philosophy. Whether the asset is a world-class technology manufacturer mispriced as a commodity producer, or a battered payments company whose enduring franchises the market has discounted amid a leadership shake-up, the opportunity comes from buying quality at a price that does not reflect its worth. In a market reshaped by the relentless demand of artificial intelligence on one hand, and by sharp, emotional reactions to short-term news on the other, the patient investor who keeps a steady eye on price stands to find value where others see only risk.