Front Page
The largest US listing a foreign company has ever made begins regular trading today — and it puts American money and American factory pressure on the same table.
SK Hynix Lands on Nasdaq with a $26.5 Billion Debut, the Biggest Ever by a Foreign Firm
SK Hynix priced its American depositary receipts at $149 apiece last Thursday and raised roughly $26.5 billion, edging past the $25 billion Alibaba raised in 2014 to set a record for a foreign company's first US share sale. On Friday the ADRs climbed about 13 percent to close near $168, and from today they trade under the permanent ticker SKHY. Only SpaceX's $85.7 billion float in June was a larger US listing this year. Demand ran at seven times the shares on offer, drawing orders that reportedly neared $200 billion across more than 500 institutions. The company, which holds a 56.4 percent share of the high-bandwidth memory market that AI accelerators depend on, says the proceeds will fund fabrication capacity at home, including plants in Yongin and Cheongju and more EUV lithography equipment.
Between the Lines
Until now, Americans who wanted to bet on the AI memory shortage had one clean way to do it: Micron. SK Hynix arrives as a second, larger option, and the pricing tells you how badly Wall Street wanted it — foreign issuers usually offer a discount to lure buyers, yet SK Hynix priced its ADRs slightly above its Seoul close and still drew a book covered seven times over.
The same week the bell rang in Times Square, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stood at a Micron construction site in New York and named Samsung and SK Hynix directly, pressing both to build memory fabs on US soil. So Washington now wants two things from the same company at once: its shares on a US exchange, and its factories inside US borders. SK Hynix is sending the capital it just raised toward Yongin and Cheongju, not Texas. That gap between where the money is welcomed and where the plants are wanted is the tension worth watching as the ADR trades.
Samsung's Quarterly Profit Passes Nvidia's, a First for the Korean Giant
Samsung's preliminary second-quarter operating profit reached 89.4 trillion won (about $58.6 billion), up 1,810 percent from a year earlier and beating a consensus near 84 trillion won. The figure tops the $53.5 billion Nvidia booked in its most recent quarter, making Samsung the most profitable major tech company in the world for the period. It also exceeds the 82.9 trillion won Samsung earned across all of 2023 through 2025 combined. The result carries 15 to 19 trillion won in newly agreed bonus provisions; without them, profit would have cleared 100 trillion won.
Special Counsel Closes In on the Cover-Up, Not Just the Case
A special counsel team is probing whether Seoul prosecutors cleared former first lady Kim Keon Hee of stock-manipulation charges in 2024 without a proper review, then revised an internal report after the fact. Choi Jae-hoon, who led the anti-corruption division that handled the case, has been booked on suspicion of falsifying an official document. Korean outlets report investigators also found signs that prosecutors and Kim's side coordinated her written answers. With the mandate set to expire July 24, the team is racing to decide how to charge each thread.
International
🔄 Tracking: US–Iran · ongoing
The strikes and the talks are now happening in the same week — and that is the story.
US Hits Iran a Third Time This Week as Negotiators Meet in Oman
American forces struck about 140 Iranian military targets on Friday, the third round of strikes in a week, after Revolutionary Guard units attacked container ships near the Strait of Hormuz and declared the passage closed. At the same time, negotiators met in Muscat, where a tentative plan to split the strait into two managed shipping lanes is on the table. The US Treasury also canceled an oil-sanctions waiver just 20 days after granting it. Iranian officials, meanwhile, have privately told Washington that the ship attacks were the work of hardliners acting on their own.
Between the Lines
The Trump administration is striking and talking at once, and Tehran is answering in two voices — a public declaration that the strait is closed, and a quiet message that the attacks were rogue. Read together, the pattern looks less like chaos than like both sides keeping a channel open while each shows the other it can still hit.
For a leadership that claims control while disowning the acts done in its name, that ambiguity is itself the leverage: it lets Tehran test how much pressure the strikes generate without owning the escalation. Whether the Muscat lane plan survives the next attack is the real measure of how serious the talks are.
A storm that has already displaced nearly two million people in China is worth watching for the indirect rain it may push toward Korea later this week.
Typhoon Bavi Makes Landfall in Eastern China After Brushing Past Taiwan
Typhoon Bavi made landfall late Saturday in the coastal city of Taizhou, in Zhejiang province, after weakening off the Philippines and brushing past northern Taiwan, where forecasters had warned of up to a meter of rain. Chinese authorities evacuated nearly two million people ahead of the storm, more than 1.7 million of them across Zhejiang. Korea sits outside the direct path, but forecasters say Bavi's remnants could feed additional rain into the peninsula in the latter half of the week, layered on top of an ongoing heat wave.
Thirty-one years on, the remains of the murdered are still being found and buried — and the naming of the crime still blocks a country's path into Europe.
Srebrenica Marks 31 Years as Ten More Victims Are Laid to Rest
Thousands gathered at the Potocari memorial center on Friday to mark 31 years since the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II. Ten newly identified victims were buried, bringing the total interred there to 6,782; more than 1,000 people remain unaccounted for. Serbia's continued refusal to accept the killings as genocide keeps the country's European Union accession stalled.
Korea
The ruling party's leadership race carries a fight over how far Korea strips its prosecutors of their power to investigate.
A Three-Way Race for the Ruling Party's Leadership Turns on Prosecution Reform
The Democratic Party will elect a new leader at an August 17 convention, in a contest that has settled into a three-way race among former leader Chung Chung-rae, former Prime Minister Kim Min-seok, and six-term lawmaker Song Young-gil. Chung, who stepped down in late June to run again, wants prosecutors' supplementary investigative power abolished without exception; President Lee Jae Myung has signaled he prefers minimal carve-outs. The party has also adopted a one-person-one-vote membership system and a preferential-vote count with no runoff.
Korea Context
The new rules replace a delegate-weighted system in which lawmaker-led blocs could mobilize organized votes. Giving every member an equal vote favors candidates with a large, motivated grassroots base — which is why Chung, backed by the party's reform-minded core, is seen as the early beneficiary.
Between the Lines
Read as a factional contest, the race misses what is new about it. The rules have already tilted the field before a single vote is cast: equal-weight balloting rewards the candidate with the most committed members, and Chung has spent months on the road building exactly that.
The stakes connect straight to today's front page. Chung's signature demand — ending prosecutors' investigative power outright — draws its force from cases like the Kim Keon Hee cover-up probe, where the charge is that prosecutors themselves buried an investigation. Whoever wins in August sets how hard that reform is pushed, which is why the special counsel's findings and the convention are reading the same argument from opposite ends.
Korea reached for the top rung of a warning system it built only last month — a marker of how much its summers have changed.
Korea Issues Its First-Ever Heat Wave Emergency Warning
At 10 a.m. Sunday the Korea Meteorological Administration issued a heat wave emergency warning for the cities of Gyeongsan and Pohang, the first use of the highest tier since the agency moved to a three-level system on June 1. The warning triggers when the feels-like temperature is set to top 38 degrees Celsius after two days above 35, or the air temperature to pass 39. Hayang-eup in Gyeongsan hit 39.9 degrees on Saturday, a tenth short of 40. Two high-pressure systems, one Pacific and one Tibetan, are stacked over the peninsula, and the heat is expected to peak Monday. The agency notes the country's average number of heat wave days has more than doubled over five decades, from eight in the 1970s to 19 in recent years.
The widow who leads a church with a global footprint faces a heavy sentencing demand in a case that reaches the former presidential couple.
Prosecutors Seek 13 Years for Unification Church Leader Han Hak-ja
At a closing hearing on Friday, the special counsel asked the Seoul Central District Court to sentence Han Hak-ja to 13 years in prison. The 82-year-old has run the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification since founder Sun Myung Moon died in 2012. She is accused of arranging luxury gifts — a diamond necklace and Chanel bags — for former first lady Kim Keon Hee through an intermediary, and of routing 100 million won (about $66,000) to a conservative lawmaker. Prosecutors say both were meant to win favors as Yoon Suk Yeol ran for president in 2022. Han's side denies the charges, arguing a former aide acted alone.
Economy & Industry
One Chip Cycle Now Swings the Whole Market
Korea's benchmark spent the first half of July on a rollercoaster tied almost entirely to memory chips. When Meta hinted it might cap capital spending, a reading that AI memory demand had peaked spread through the market and knocked the KOSPI down nearly 8 percent on July 2, before it rebounded the next session. On July 7, Samsung's record profit was met with a selloff rather than a rally, and the index fell again. By July 10, buying ahead of SK Hynix's Nasdaq debut lifted the KOSPI 2.52 percent to a record 7,475.94. Whether Meta's signal actually points to slowing demand is disputed even among analysts.
The takeaway — when two chipmakers can move an entire national index by this much, the KOSPI now tracks one global cycle more than the domestic economy it is meant to reflect.
Behind Samsung's Record: One Division Carries the Rest
Samsung's historic quarter was almost entirely a memory story. Analysts estimate the chip division generated operating profit in the 90 trillion won range, driven by sharp DRAM and NAND price increases. The division covering phones, TVs and home appliances, by contrast, is thought to have earned close to nothing, squeezed by those same rising memory costs. The foundry and System LSI units remained in the red. TrendForce expects contract DRAM prices to keep climbing 13 to 18 percent in the third quarter, a slower pace than the roughly 40 percent jump of the second. That deceleration helps explain why a record print drew a selloff rather than a rally. On July 7, JPMorgan flagged Samsung's forward price-to-earnings ratio near 5.2 — unusually compressed for a peak quarter, and in its reading, a sign the market has already priced in the cycle's reversal.
The takeaway — a company earning a trillion won a day is leaning on one business to do it, and the market's July nervousness is really a bet on how long that single cycle holds.
Korea Answers the Reshoring Push with a Bet at Home
As Washington presses Korean chipmakers to build inside the United States — Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick named Samsung and SK Hynix directly at a Micron site last week — Seoul is doubling down at home. Under a national initiative championed by President Lee Jae Myung, Samsung and SK have pledged around $518 billion toward two new fabrication complexes in the country's southwest, aiming to roughly double memory output within five years. Micron is separately raising its own US commitment to $250 billion through 2035, and China's CXMT is racing to close the gap.
The takeaway — every major producer is pouring capital into memory at once, which is precisely the setup that has tipped past chip booms into oversupply.
Briefs
Court administration chief named after four-month gap. Chief Justice Cho Hee-dae appointed Roh Kyung-pil to lead the National Court Administration, filling a vacancy left since February as Supreme Court justice nominations stay stalled.
「Source ↗」 UPI
Three killed in Incheon overpass crash. A sedan crossed the center line on an overpass in Incheon's Geomdan district early Saturday, setting off a head-on collision and chain crash that left three dead and one injured.
「Source ↗」 Kookmin Ilbo
Korea makes its digital nomad visa permanent. The F-1-D "workation" visa became a standing program on June 30, with income thresholds eased by age and region and the maximum stay extended to three years.
「Source ↗」 Korea Herald
Weather
Extreme heat grips the entire country, peaking Monday. Highs run from 30 to 37°C with tropical nights near 23 to 27°C. Scattered afternoon showers are possible over central regions and North Jeolla; heavy swells are expected along the Jeju and south coasts. Based on the KMA forecast issued July 12.
| | Mon 14 | Tue 15 | Wed 16 | Thu 17 |
|---|
| Low (°C) | 23–27 | 24–27 | 23–27 | 23–26 |
| High (°C) | 30–37 | 28–36 | 27–36 | 27–35 |
Advisory: heat-illness risk is high even for healthy adults under the emergency warning; limit midday outdoor activity and stay hydrated. Watch for coastal swells on Jeju and the south coast.
Editorial
Read today's business pages in order and one thread runs through all of them. Samsung books the largest quarterly profit in Korean corporate history. SK Hynix stages the biggest US listing a foreign company has ever made. And between those two milestones, a single hint from Meta about capital spending sends both stocks — and the whole KOSPI — sliding, then snapping back, inside a week.
The same memory-chip cycle wrote all three stories. It is what makes Samsung the most profitable major tech company on earth for a quarter, what draws $200 billion in orders to a Korean ADR, and what lets a comment from one American tech firm swing an entire national index. Korea has bound its markets, its export numbers and its corporate crown to one global boom.
That concentration is the strength and the exposure at once. When Commerce Secretary Lutnick presses these same two companies to move their fabs onto US soil, he is reaching for the thing Korea has made itself indispensable in. The chips that carried the profit are now the leverage others will use. The country that rode the cycle up will be tested on how it holds its ground when the cycle turns.
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