South Korean memory star has landed on New York Stock Exchange's Nasdaq index with a 14% premium to its issue price at $170. The shares quickly surged over 18% to a high of $177.
The listing paves another way for US investors to buy into the AI and memory boom through South Korea's second most valuable company after Samsung.
SK Hynix raised a record $26.5 billion through share sales, making it the largest ADR listing ever. As of 12:40 p.m. EST, the American Depository Receipts (ADRs) traded 16.4% higher at $174.
The company specialises in manufacturing high bandwidth memory, used to power AI data center servers, Large Language Models (LLMs), and high-end GPUs. Occupying nearly 60% of the global market share, Hynix is a supplier to the some of the biggest semiconductor companies including Nvidia.
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However, its shares seem to be struggling slightly on the KOSPI index as they have fallen over 10% in the last five days. SK Hynix's stock closed 0.27% lower at 21,80,000 South Korean won (roughly $1,449.17).
Inspite of its HBM dominance, SK Hynix trades at around 5.8 times forward earnings versus Micron at around 7 times, as per LSEG ​data. By way of this listing, the company will not only enter world's largest financial arena, but might also initiate a correction for Micron's stock price.
"The ADR gives global institutional capital direct access to that leadership without the Korean-market infrastructure friction that historically kept SK Hynix trading at a discount to Micron, and that structural discount should compress over the coming weeks as float builds and coverage catches up," said Harshal Dasani, Business Head at INVAsset PMS.
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