SK Hynix Targets Up to $24.5 Billion in Nasdaq ADR Listing as Chey Tae-won Rings Opening Bell

Chey Tae-won takes SK Hynix’s AI pitch to New York

US share sale could rank as second-largest ever by a foreign issuer

“Hynix needs to grow 10-fold from here”

Chey Tae-won, chairman of SK Group, will appear in person at the opening-bell ceremony for SK Hynix Inc.’s American depositary receipt listing on Nasdaq. He is set to attend the listing event, meet global investors and discuss ways to expand cooperation on AI memory with major customers. The move could become a watershed for how SK Hynix is valued, shifting the company’s image from a commodity memory maker to a key global AI infrastructure supplier.

Chey will attend the ceremony in New York on July 10 with senior executives including SK Hynix Chief Executive Officer Kwak Noh-jung, according to the investment industry on July 9.

The event marks SK Hynix’s Nasdaq debut. Chey and other executives are expected to explain the company’s competitiveness and medium- to long-term growth strategy directly to global investors.

The ADR offering is worth about $31.2 billion, with as many as 17.79 million new shares to be issued, equivalent to about 2.5% of shares outstanding. Bloomberg reported on July 9, citing people familiar with the matter, that the deal attracted orders for more than seven times the shares on offer. Demand came from global long-term funds, technology-focused funds, sovereign wealth funds and global investors specializing in Asia, the people said.

The offer price will be set on July 9. If it is fixed at SK Hynix’s July 8 closing price of 2.076 million won, the company would raise $24.5 billion. That would make it the second-largest US listing ever by a foreign company, behind Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s $25 billion deal.

The ADRs will begin provisional trading on Nasdaq on July 10 and switch to regular trading on July 13. Proceeds will be used to build the first fab at the Yongin semiconductor cluster and the P&T7 advanced packaging fab in Cheongju, and to buy equipment including extreme ultraviolet scanners.

Chey’s attendance underscores SK Hynix’s effort to showcase its AI memory strength and growth potential to global investors. The ADR listing is intended to help the company, which has emerged as a key player in expanding AI infrastructure, secure fuller recognition in global capital markets.

In “Super Momentum,” a book published earlier this year about SK Hynix’s success in high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, Chey wrote that the market still viewed the company as a commodity manufacturer and had not fully rewarded it with a higher valuation. “Hynix needs to grow 10-fold from here,” he wrote. The comment reflects his goal of turning SK Hynix into a provider of customer-tailored AI memory solutions rather than a simple memory supplier.

Investors also see a possibility that Chey will meet executives at major US technology companies including Nvidia Corp. and Tesla Inc. during his trip. In February, he met Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang in Silicon Valley and discussed longer-term cooperation covering not only HBM but also SOCAMM, a next-generation server memory module, NAND flash and the buildout of AI data centers. He met Huang again in South Korea last month when the Nvidia CEO visited the country, reaffirming the partnership.

Kim Dong-won, head of research at KB Securities, said the ADR listing would broaden access for global investors and could trigger a re-rating of both the US-listed ADRs and the Korea-listed common shares.

Kim added that the listing was particularly meaningful when compared with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s ADR listing in the US in October 1997. TSMC’s ADRs traded at a premium to the common shares as its global investor base widened, and that in turn drove continued demand for conversions and arbitrage aimed at exploiting the price gap between the two, he said.

Kang Kyung-ju, Hankyung.com reporter, qurasoha@hankyung.com