SKHX Adds 11% Into SK Hynix's Record Nasdaq Debut as the Book Closes 7x Oversubscribed

The Catalyst

SKHX is trading near $1,481, up 11.41% on the day, as SK Hynix locks the final price on the largest US equity sale it has ever attempted. Global investors placed orders for more than seven times the ADRs on offer — roughly $171.5 billion of total demand against 177.9 million shares — with the ADRs set to begin interim trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under [SKHY](/movers/skhy) on Friday and regular trading Monday. Anchor institutions including Baillie Gifford, Coatue and Situational Awareness reportedly committed up to $7 billion between them. SKHX, which converts the Seoul-listed common share from won into dollars, is the tape traders are using to price that demand in real time while the ADR itself has not opened.

Why a Record Raise Priced Off the Low

The headline number shrinking is the whole story. SK Hynix marketed the deal targeting as much as ~$29 billion, a size that would have topped Alibaba as the biggest-ever US listing by a foreign company. Instead it prices near $24.5 billion, just shy of Alibaba's ~$25 billion record, because the underlying got wrecked in the run-up. On July 2 the shares fell 14.5%, part of a memory-chip rout that also knocked Samsung down 9.1% and the Kospi 7.9% after reports that Meta is building a cloud business to resell excess AI compute reignited fears that hyperscaler chip demand has peaked. By Wednesday's close SK Hynix sat roughly 30.5% below its June 25 intraday record of ₩2.99M. That is why a book covered seven times over still produced a smaller check: you can force demand, but you price against the last print.

What SKHX Is Actually Pricing

Two things move SKHX at once. The first is the Seoul share firming off its rout low as the deal gets done; the second is the FX leg, since the oracle converts the KRW price to USD and any won move feeds straight into the mark. At ~$1,481 the tracker sits at a premium to SK Hynix's last Seoul close near $1,380 — the market front-running Friday's open. That premium exists for a structural reason: US accounts still cannot buy SKHY until it lists, so a HIP-3 perp is the only leveraged, real-time line on the memory maker that has locked up two-thirds of Nvidia's HBM4 requirement for the Vera-Rubin platform. If SKHY opens strong on Friday, the premium is validated; if the debut fades, this tracker is where that air comes out first.