SK Hynix reaches Nasdaq as investors focus on valuation
SK Hynix began trading on Nasdaq on July 10 at an offering price of $149. The stock closed up nearly 13% on its first day, giving the company a market capitalization of $1.23 trillion.
The IPO raised $26.5 billion. According to the source article, that surpassed Alibaba’s $25 billion U.S. listing in 2014 to become the largest fundraising by a foreign company in the U.S. market. The article also says it was second only to SpaceX’s $75 billion financing last month in the history of domestic U.S. equity issuance.
But the article argues the deal was not really about plugging a cash gap. SK Hynix posted a 77% net profit margin in the first quarter and earned 40 trillion won, or about $30 billion, in quarterly net profit. That is more than the amount raised in the IPO. The source adds that the offering accounted for less than 3% of total market value, with only 2.5% of new shares issued.
By that reading, the Nasdaq listing was aimed less at financing operations and more at securing a different valuation framework.
From industry downturn to one of AI’s highest-profit companies
The article notes that only three years ago, few expected SK Hynix to emerge as one of the most profitable companies in the AI supply chain. Its predecessor, Hyundai Electronics, nearly collapsed in 2002 during a memory downturn. Creditors had even reached a sale arrangement with Micron, but the deal did not go through after resistance from the board and employees, according to the piece.
The company then spent about a decade under creditor control before being acquired by SK Group in 2012 and renamed. As recently as 2023, during another memory downcycle, SK Hynix recorded what the article describes as its largest-ever net loss, at $6 billion.
It then moved from that record loss to a 77% first-quarter net margin in two years, a turnaround the article links to severe supply-demand imbalance in the AI era.
The prospectus said most of the IPO proceeds would go toward wafer fab construction in South Korea. Even so, the article stresses that SK Hynix is already generating quarterly net profit cash inflows on the order of $30 billion, making internal funding a viable option for expansion.
The case for a U.S. listing rests on pricing, not just capital
The article centers its explanation on valuation. It says SK Hynix, listed in South Korea, posted 198% year-over-year revenue growth in the first quarter of 2026, 405% growth in operating profit, and about 398% growth in net profit. Even with that earnings surge, it says the company’s medium- to long-term fair forward price-to-earnings midpoint remains around 8x because of memory-cycle perceptions and a liquidity discount in Korean equities.
Micron Technology, by comparison, also sells memory chips but holds a much smaller share of the HBM market, while trading at more than 23x earnings, according to the article. The source describes that gap as roughly a threefold valuation difference for companies in the same broad industry.
HSBC said in a research note, as cited by the article, that SK Hynix had been the world’s cheapest AI asset for the past 13 years and traded at an average 35% discount to Micron. The article’s conclusion is straightforward: the company came to Nasdaq not because it needed the $26.5 billion, but because it wanted global capital to reprice the stock.
Korea Discount and HBM leadership
The article uses the term “Korea Discount,” a long-running market label for the lower valuations often assigned to South Korean listed companies compared with U.S. peers. It attributes that discount to lower market liquidity, higher barriers for overseas capital, a limited institutional base, a larger retail share, and weaker dividend culture.
It cites Samsung Electronics as a familiar example, saying one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers still carries a market value of less than half of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
For SK Hynix, the argument is even sharper because of its position in AI memory. GPUs handle compute. HBM feeds data to those GPUs at higher speeds. As GPU performance rises, the article says one of the key bottlenecks in model training has shifted toward data delivery, which is where HBM matters most.
Based on the latest IDC data cited in the piece, SK Hynix holds 56.4% of the global HBM market, more than twice the share of second-place Samsung Electronics. The article also says roughly 70% of HBM4 orders for Nvidia’s next-generation NVL72 Vera Rubin platform have gone to SK Hynix.
On the technology side, the source says SK Hynix has led rivals by more than one generation in HBM since 2021. Samsung’s HBM3 was not certified by Nvidia until July 2024, and then only for the China-focused H20 chip, while Micron skipped HBM3 altogether, according to the article.
That leaves a sharp mismatch in the source’s telling: a company with a dominant role in AI memory trades at around 8x earnings in Seoul, while Nvidia trades at close to 40x. The article says technology and financial performance alone do not explain that gap; listing venue does.
Reuters, citing Roundhill Investments CEO Dave Mazza, said SK Hynix is one of the world’s most important companies, but U.S. institutions previously had no easy way to buy the stock. That barrier changes on Nasdaq. The article says the buyer base can now widen from mostly domestic South Korean investors to global pensions, mutual funds, ETFs, sovereign funds, and long-duration U.S. capital.
HSBC forecasts that SK Hynix’s price-to-book ratio could rise from 2.8x to 3.4x after its Nasdaq listing. In the article’s view, a change in venue alone could add hundreds of billions of dollars in market value.
AI spending pressure is rising as HBM4 changes the cost structure
The article also points to timing. AI infrastructure is becoming more expensive at every layer: each new model costs more, each new GPU generation gets pricier, HBM prices are rising, and both data center construction and power costs continue to move up. In that setting, companies with durable access to large pools of low-cost capital gain an edge.
There is also a technical shift in memory itself. Starting with HBM4, the article says memory chips will no longer be pure memory products and will require logic-process integration. SK Hynix has already made clear that the Base Die for HBM4 will not be produced in-house. Instead, it will be outsourced to TSMC using customized 2 nm or 3 nm advanced processes.
That changes the capital equation. The article says competition in memory used to center on internal process iteration and cost improvement within a company’s own fabs. In the HBM4 era, SK Hynix must also pay for TSMC’s expensive leading-edge tape-outs, co-development tied to advanced packaging, and major fab spending in South Korea’s Yongin cluster.
The source adds that Micron, despite its smaller market share, used access to U.S. capital to skip HBM3 and direct major funds toward next-generation research and capacity expansion. Samsung, meanwhile, is pushing across the board with the backing of group-level financial resources. In the article’s framing, being one generation ahead in memory means survival, while being half a generation behind can be fatal.
It also says that, based on first-quarter income, SK Hynix is making 2 billion yuan in net profit per day. Even so, semiconductors remain cyclical. If AI infrastructure buildouts slow for a period, or if rivals break through in advanced process technology, the company will still need a stronger external capital shield.
South Korea’s five-year plan and the pull of New York
The article says the South Korean government and the semiconductor industry recently unveiled a $576 billion investment plan. Samsung and SK Hynix are expected to take the core share, with a goal of doubling domestic memory output over the next five years.
In that context, the article argues that the financing burden is now too large for a single regional market to absorb. SK Hynix needs the deepest global funding pool available for high-tech research and large-scale capacity expansion. In the source’s telling, New York is the only practical choice.
Capital efficiency is becoming part of semiconductor competition
The article closes by comparing what different equity markets let companies do with the same earnings base. SK Hynix trades on roughly 8x earnings in South Korea, while Micron trades at 23x in the U.S., based on the figures cited in the piece. That means the same $1 of profit supports a very different refinancing or collateral capacity depending on where the shares are priced.
Its broader point is that valuation itself has become a competitive tool. A listing venue no longer just determines where a stock changes hands. It shapes how much leverage a company can get from equity issuance, how easily it can fund research, how aggressively it can expand capacity, and how effectively it can lock up supply chains.
The article says that if trading volume and market-value weight increasingly shift to Nasdaq, global institutions may begin to use the U.S. price as the main anchor, leaving Seoul with reduced pricing power.
It ends on a narrower point than “leaving Korea.” SK Hynix is still building most of its new fabs in South Korea, and the funds it raised are also expected to be invested there. What changed, in the article’s view, is not where the company manufactures, but where its capital identity is priced.