Reported by Consejeros Editorial Team
SK Hynix’s ADRs began trading on Friday on the Nasdaq through an offering valued at 40.02 trillion won, equivalent to approximately 26,507 million dollars (around 2.45 per cent of the share capital) at a price of $149 per share. With these figures, the deal becomes the largest IPO by a foreign company on Wall Street since Alibaba’s in 2014, and the third-largest of any kind recorded to date.
The shares closed up 12.76 per cent and even rose as much as 19 per cent at the session’s high. However, during today’s trading session in South Korea, the share price has corrected by almost 15 per cent, weighed down by this weekend’s news of the resurgence of the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz.
SK Hynix’s strong stock market debut on the Nasdaq reinforces optimism surrounding chip manufacturers and the investment cycle in artificial intelligence. At Norbolsa, they believe that “this is further evidence of investor enthusiasm for the AI value chain”, although they also maintain that “doubts remain regarding the high valuations in the technology sector and the impact that a new escalation between the US and Iran could have on inflation and interest rates”. For analysts at Bankinter, the figures from SK Hynix’s IPO “reflect the fact that the stock is now much more readily investable for both retail and institutional investors”.
The South Korean company reiterated that it will use the funds raised to finance several strategic projects: the construction of a plant in the Yongin semiconductor cluster, located south of Seoul; an advanced chip packaging factory in Cheongju, in North Chungcheong Province; and the purchase of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment.
SK Hynix is one of the leading suppliers of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, to Nvidia. Furthermore, alongside Samsung Electronics and the US-based Micron, it forms part of the small group of companies that control the supply of memory chips essential to the advancement of artificial intelligence.
