The most unusual case among companies whose earnings and stock prices skyrocketed due to AI

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According to Bloomberg on the 15th (local time), the fortune of Lin Yung-chi, the founder of Taiwan's KingSlide, grew to $19.4 billion (approximately 27 trillion KRW) as of the end of last month. The 80-year-old Lin briefly surpassed Barry Lam, the founder of Quanta Computer, to become Taiwan's richest person earlier this year.
Founded in 1986, KingSlide originally manufactured furniture handles and slide rails that allow drawers to open and close smoothly. The turning point came around 2000. As Chinese manufacturing grew rapidly, major US clients demanded a 30% reduction in supply prices. KingSlide refused, leading to a crisis so severe that they had to lay off nearly half of their employees.
Instead, the company turned its attention to the server component market. They accumulated technical expertise over 20 years by starting to supply companies like Compaq and IBM. Currently, they supply high-performance slide rails required for inserting, removing, or maintaining AI servers that can weigh hundreds of kilograms in a rack. KingSlide is estimated to hold a market share of over 70% in the high-end AI server rail market.
With the AI boom, their long-term investment has finally paid off. In less than four years since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, KingSlide's market capitalization has surged by more than 3,000%, reaching $43 billion (approximately 59 trillion KRW). Jane Lin, the daughter of Lin Yung-chi and the company's president, described it as "feeling like gold bars are raining from the sky."
Since the crisis in 2000, KingSlide has accumulated over 3,800 patents, and its engineering organization has grown from just 7 people to more than 500. They have also accelerated their development speed to the point where they can produce prototypes within weeks of receiving a client request.
After facing a crisis from cheap Chinese products as a furniture slide rail manufacturer, they pivoted to data center server rack slide rails.
As AI data center servers became heavier in terms of PSUs and cooling devices compared to traditional data center servers,
they have nearly monopolized the AI data center server rack slide rail market.
The expected operating profit for this year is over 1 trillion KRW, with an operating profit margin of 77% in the first half of the year and a market cap of 48 trillion KRW.