For a quarter of a century, the most valuable company in South Korea was Samsung Electronics, and the question was never really open. On Wednesday it became open, and then it closed the other way.
SK Hynix, the smaller of the country’s two memory-chip makers, passed Samsung in market capitalisation during intraday trading, taking the top spot on the Korea Exchange for the first time since Samsung claimed it in November 2000.
By midday, SK Hynix’s common shares were worth roughly 2,057 trillion won, narrowly ahead of Samsung’s 2,051 trillion. The gap is slim enough to carry a caveat: include Samsung’s preferred shares, worth around 180 trillion won, and the older company is still comfortably larger overall.
On common stock alone, though, the bellwether has changed, and SK Hynix shares rose more than 5 per cent on the day, pulling the wider KOSPI up with them.
The cause is not in dispute. SK Hynix has spent two years as the dominant supplier of high-bandwidth memory, the stacked chips that sit beside Nvidia’s accelerators and feed them data fast enough to keep up.
