South Korea's No. 2 company just hit Wall Street in a big way. SK Hynix began trading on the Nasdaq Friday at $170 under the temporary ticker SKHYV—about 14% above its initial $149 "American depositary receipt" price—raising $26.5 billion to fund a massive build-out of chip plants and equipment, CNBC reports. ADRs allow Americans to easily buy foreign stocks on exchanges like the Nasdaq. The listing, which will switch to SKHY on Tuesday, gives US investors direct access to a key supplier to Nvidia and Apple and the top producer of the high-bandwidth memory powering today's AI chips. In market capitalization, SK Hynix is behind only Samsung in South Korea, where the two companies dominate the stock market.
The offering is the biggest-ever US share sale by a foreign company, and it comes as chip stocks have been on a rollercoaster ride, the Wall Street Journal reports. Its blockbuster debut follows SpaceX's record IPO about a month earlier. Once considered a low-profile corner of the chip world, memory has been transformed by the AI boom, with demand so strong that SK Hynix says even plans to double capacity in five years aren't satisfying customers.
The company's market value has surged more than sevenfold in the past year amid a shortage of advanced memory and rising prices. The US is the company's largest market, accounting for almost 70% of its revenue last year, per the AP. SK Hynix is planning a $4 billion packaging plant in Indiana, but most of its expansion—including a $390 billion cluster of fabrication facilities in Yongin—will remain in South Korea, reports CNBC.
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