SKHX Firms as SK Hynix Prices a $24.5B Nasdaq Debut Off Its Selloff Low

Pricing a Record Into a Selloff

SK Hynix set the final price on its Nasdaq ADR offering Thursday, July 9, with ADRs set to begin trading Friday under the ticker SKHY. The book was more than seven times oversubscribed, with roughly $171.5 billion in total orders. Yet the raise landed near $24.5 billion — below the ~$28–29 billion figure that had been floated — because it prices off SK Hynix's Wednesday Seoul close of about 2.08 million won (~$1,380 per share) after the July 2 memory rout knocked the stock down 14.5%. Even sized down, it is the largest U.S. listing ever by a foreign company, trailing only SpaceX's $85.7 billion June debut. SKHX, which tracks one Korean share converted KRW-to-USD, sits at $1,420 — a small premium to that last Seoul close and the only leveraged, real-time proxy while U.S. accounts can't own SKHY until Friday.

A 7x Book, a Smaller Deal

The disconnect is the story. Demand was overwhelming — Baillie Gifford, Coatue and Situational Awareness alone indicated up to a combined $7 billion, roughly a quarter of the deal, with Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan leading the syndicate. But the reference price fell into pricing. On July 2, SK Hynix dropped 14.5% and Samsung 9.1%, dragging the Kospi down 7.9% and triggering an emergency halt, part of a rout that wiped roughly $1.5 trillion from memory names since late June and sent Micron down 13% in a single session. The trigger: reports that Meta is building a cloud business to resell excess AI compute, plus talk that SK Hynix could slow HBM expansion — the AI-capex-sustainability fear compressed into one tape. A book covered seven times over off a beaten-down close means real money still wants the HBM leader even as the broader trade corrected.

What SKHX Is Pricing

Underneath the deal noise, the fundamentals are why the book stayed covered. SK Hynix controls roughly 60% of the high-bandwidth-memory market that feeds Nvidia's accelerators, and in the first quarter it posted revenue near ₩52.6 trillion, up close to 200% year over year, at an operating margin above 70%. The stock ran up more than 250% on the year before the selloff clipped it. SKHX is the cleanest read on all of that right now — a leveraged, around-the-clock line on a name U.S. investors literally cannot buy until SKHY opens Friday. Two things frame it: the gap between the perp and Friday's ADR open, and whether SKHX's premium to Seoul spot holds or the USD/KRW leg baked into the oracle erodes it. The bull-versus-bear split here is the memory trade in miniature — an HBM shortage on one side, questions about whether AI buildout spending can sustain ~200% growth on the other.