SK Hynix, the world’s leading manufacturer of high-bandwidth memory, debuted on the Nasdaq yesterday, after raising $26.5 billion in the largest U.S. listing ever by a foreign company and the second-largest share sale in U.S. history, trailing SpaceX’s $86 billion IPO last month. Shares rose 12.8% in their first day of trading.
The listing gives U.S. investors direct access to a chipmaker that’s closely tied to the AI boom, making the specialized memory chips that sit inside almost every Nvidia processor, and now command high prices amid a major shortage.
“We’ve announced plans to double production capacity within five years, but every customer says, ‘That’s still not enough—we need more’,” SK Group Chair Chey Tae-won told CNBC on Friday, the day of the listing.
SK Hynix’s shares, currently traded in Korea, have surged more than 630% over the past 12 months, pushing its market value past $1 trillion, only the second Korean company to hit that milestone after Samsung Electronics.
Yet SK Hynix, like many other Korean companies, suffers from what’s been called the “Korea Discount,” where shares are traded at a discount compared to global peers—and, at worst, trade below book value. U.S. chipmaker Micron Technology, for example, boasts a $1.1 trillion valuation, despite SK Hynix being significantly more profitable.
