SK Hynix’s American listing has been more than seven times oversubscribed, according to people familiar with the deal, a sign of heavy demand for one of the largest share sales Wall Street has fielded from a foreign company.
The South Korean memory-chip maker was due to price its offering of American depositary receipts on Thursday, ahead of a Nasdaq debut on 10 July, a step it first signalled earlier in the year.
The company is selling 177.9 million ADRs, each representing one-tenth of a common share, under the ticker SKHY. Bookbuilding, which opened on 6 July, closed early on Wednesday US time after orders covered the book several times over, the sources told Bloomberg and Reuters.
Demand came from a broad mix of institutions, including global long-only funds, technology-focused funds, sovereign wealth funds, and Asia-focused investors. Baillie Gifford, funds managed by Coatue Management, and Situational Awareness Partners had separately indicated interest in buying up to a combined $7bn of the ADRs, according to the reports.
In value terms, orders were said to have reached roughly $171.5bn, dwarfing the shares on offer. That level of interest handed underwriters an unusually strong base heading into final pricing.
Analysts expect further demand once the ADRs are folded into major benchmarks, a mechanical source of buying on top of the active orders. One estimate cited in local coverage put the potential passive inflows from index inclusion at around $15bn, though such figures rest on assumptions about weightings and timing.
The size of the deal has moved. SK Hynix launched the marketing process targeting about $28bn, a figure that would have made it the largest US listing ever by a foreign company, surpassing Alibaba’s $25bn debut in 2014 and Saudi Aramco’s 2019 sale.
That was itself a step up from the roughly $14bn the company floated when the plan was earlier reported.
A recent pullback in the company’s Seoul-listed shares has trimmed the likely proceeds. Priced against Wednesday’s close of about 2.08 million won, the sale would raise roughly $24.5bn, which would rank it second among foreign US listings, behind Alibaba, Bloomberg calculated. Some outlets, working off the higher target, have described it as the largest such deal on record, so the final ranking hinges on Thursday’s price.
The indicative price had been set around 242,500 won per ADR, or about $158, in a revised filing. The offering is a sale of new shares, so the proceeds flow to the company rather than to exiting holders.
The listing is the clearest sign yet of how the artificial-intelligence boom has reshaped SK Hynix. The company is the leading supplier of high-bandwidth memory, the stacked chips that sit beside Nvidia’s accelerators, and its shares have surged as orders piled up.
SK Hynix crossed a $1tn market value earlier this year, joining Nvidia and TSMC in the trillion-dollar club and becoming the first dedicated memory maker to do so. A US listing gives it a dollar-denominated currency and a deeper pool of American investors to tap.
Proceeds are earmarked for expanding manufacturing at home. That includes new equipment such as ASML’s extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines and a vast NAND flash factory in Cheongju, part of a spending push to keep pace with demand.
The capital-raising lands as memory prices climb and rivals Samsung and Micron race to match SK Hynix’s lead in HBM. Building that capacity is expensive, and the ADR sale helps fund it without leaning solely on Korean markets or on debt.
Trading is set to begin on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on 10 July, with the final price and total raised confirmed at pricing. Investors will then learn how much of the reported demand converts into a durable shareholder base, and whether the stock holds its premium once the shares trade freely.
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