For one day, at least, South Korea had a new most valuable company.
SK hynix, one of the world’s largest producers of memory chips, surpassed Samsung Electronics in market capitalization on Monday. After a 5.6% surge in its share price, SK hynix was worth over 2.1 quadrillion won ($1.35 trillion), just ahead of Samsung at $1.34 trillion.
Samsung retook the top spot on Tuesday, after SK hynix’s shares slumped nearly 12.5% as part of a broad tech sell-off. Samsung’s shares dropped 12.3%, while the KOSPI index also dropped 10%.
Still, SK hynix’s rise to the top is a rapid change for a company that, at one point, was lost in the wilderness as a struggling electronics maker, spun off from Hyundai in 2003 and acquired by SK in 2011.
SK hynix is now the world’s leading producer of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), key to the manufacture of AI processors and graphics processing units made by companies like Nvidia. The company controls about 58% of the HBM market as measured by revenue, according to Counterpoint Research. Samsung and Micron Technologies sit in second and third place, respectively. Samsung, in particular, was slow to enter the AI processor market, letting SK hynix become the exclusive supplier for Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell platforms.
