Huge news: the Korean tech queen comes to Wall Street – but who really profits from the whole story?
More than 6 months have passed since we first revealed here the intentions of the Korean memory giant to conduct an IPO in the United States in order to receive a more prestigious price premium – and this week it's happening.
SK Hynix is expected this weekend to begin trading on Wall Street under the ticker $SKHY.
The company will issue 17 million shares on the Nasdaq exchange, at a total market cap of approximately $1.15 trillion and an opening price of approximately $158 per share.
The IPO is expected to bring into SK Hynix's coffers approximately $28 billion!
The big question is where is this money expected to flow?
And the answer is, there is a large and well-known company, that is expected to receive a massive inflow from this capital.
SK Hynix explicitly states this in its IPO prospectus!
Under the section 'Use of Proceeds', the following sentence appears:
Capital expenditures (equipment investments) and the purchase of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) scanners.
And in an official announcement from SK Hynix, it details: SK Hynix updates that it is purchasing EUV lithography systems from the Dutch company $ASML totaling approximately $8 billion, to expand its production capacity for next-generation HBM chips and advanced DRAM chips used in artificial intelligence accelerators.
The equipment, which is expected to be delivered gradually until December 2027, is expected to go down in ASML's history as its largest order ever.
Approximately 20 next-generation EUV scanner systems will be installed at the M15X factory located in Cheongju and at the new production facilities in the Yongin semiconductor cluster. In response, analysts at Bernstein raised their price target for $ASML from $1,971 to $2,623, maintaining an 'Outperform' recommendation.
Explaining the change in price target, they write: We are raising our forecast for the number of EUV devices to be delivered to 91 units in 2027 and 113 units in 2028, and expect ASML to expand its production capacity for EUV devices. This is expected to be made possible by a strong increase in the average selling price (ASP), thanks to improved device handling efficiency. SK Hynix's IPO is attracting significant attention on Wall Street; according to updates we have received, even before the official announcement of the institutional share offering, 3 massive purchase requests totaling over $7 billion have already been submitted!
To reiterate, only 3 investors requested SK Hynix shares worth approximately $7 billion, while the total offering is only around $28 billion.
And we are not talking about the large and well-known investment giants here, these are not BlackRock or Vanguard, or large banks like J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley – these are large investment funds that want a stake in the American portion of SK Hynix.
On the premium channel, we reveal one of the three names that caught our attention.
We will closely follow this IPO here, and keep a close eye on $ASML, which stands to profit from the whole story.
P.S. If you are also wondering why memory stocks are falling despite Samsung's fantastic report overnight in Korea – it is very possible that it is related to the massive IPO in the United States which is attracting capital from other memory companies in general and Korean capital in particular.