SK Hynix just pulled off something that hasn’t been done since Alibaba crashed onto the New York Stock Exchange back in 2014. The South Korean memory chipmaker raised $26.5 billion through its first US share sale, making it the largest debut offering by a foreign company in American market history.
The American Depositary Receipts were priced at $149 each on July 9, and trading kicked off the very next day on Nasdaq under the ticker SKHY. The demand was, to put it mildly, enthusiastic: the offering was more than seven times oversubscribed, with cornerstone investor interest reaching up to $7 billion.
A record that stood for over a decade
Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the kind of event that felt like it might hold the record forever. It didn’t.
SK Hynix topped it by $1.5 billion. For broader historical context, the deal ranks as the second-largest share sale ever, trailing only SpaceX’s roughly $85.7 billion offering.
