SKHY is a $26.5 billion ticket to a 40.7% premium on the same chipmaker
The largest ADS offering on record sold 2.5% of SK Hynix into a pool that cannot be refilled, and US buyers now pay 40.7% more than Seoul for identical cash flows, nearly $400 billion of valuation that exists only on Nasdaq.
Vincent Jiang · 2 min read
SK Hynix sold 177.9 million American depositary shares at $149 each on 9 July, raising $26.5 billion, the largest ADS offering on record, and capped the pool at about 2.5% of its shares 1. Three months later, that small pool carries a price the Seoul shares cannot catch up to. On 30 September the ADS closed at $184.15 on Nasdaq while one Seoul ordinary, the slice ten ADSs represent, closed at 1,776,000 won, about $130.88 per ADS: a 40.7% premium, the widest of 32 foreign stocks with US listings, 28 of which sit within 5% of parity 1.
The gap is structural, not sentiment
Normally arbitrageurs close an ADR premium by buying the local stock and minting new ADSs until parity. Seoul Economic Daily reported that creating more SKHY shares requires procedures equivalent to an additional listing, so the pool is effectively frozen at what was sold in July 1. Inside that constraint the premium has swung hard: 15.3% on 27 July, 60.1% on 30 July after Seoul sold off on earnings, 40.7% by 30 September 1.
A frozen ADS pool let the premium swing from 15.3% to 60.1% in three days
Data
| SKHY premium over Seoul | |
|---|---|
| 27 Jul | 15.3% |
| 30 Jul | 60.1% |
| 30 Sep | 40.7% |
Who wins, who pays
The issuer banked $26.5 billion at $149 into a pool it cannot refill; the ADSs now trade about 20 million shares a day, more than $3.5 billion of turnover 1. Applying the New York price to the whole company implies about $1.34 trillion of value against roughly $954 billion in Seoul and Micron at about $1.2 trillion 1. Nearly $400 billion exists only on Nasdaq.
The same chipmaker is worth $1.34T in New York and $954B in Seoul
Data
| Market value | |
|---|---|
| SK Hynix, Seoul price | $954B |
| Micron | $1,200B |
| SK Hynix at SKHY price | $1,340B |
The business underneath is identical, and it is a good one: SK Hynix held 50% of high-bandwidth memory revenue in Q2 against 33% for Samsung and 18% for Micron, and Seoul values those earnings at about 4.5 times forward, below Micron's 6.0 times 1. US buyers of SKHY are therefore paying a ticker premium, not a memory premium. Korean investors have been net buyers of the ADRs since the July debut, willing to absorb higher capital gains taxes for US-hours access 4.
Seoul's FX fund bought $20 billion of the dollars
The deal also moved national plumbing: SK Hynix repatriated the proceeds and South Korea's Foreign Exchange Stabilization Fund bought about $20 billion of the dollars in July, per a Reuters report, as the won sat near a 17-year low 3.
Anthropic's float is the next test of the access premium
SKHY is up 24% since listing, and its $26.5 billion did most of the lifting in a Q3 that raised $36.1 billion across US exchanges, the second-most-active quarter since 2021 2. Anthropic's float, reportedly pricing into the same AI demand, is the next test of who pays the access premium 2.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
