Daily Woody | Jul 9, 2026 — SK Hynix's $28bn Nasdaq Debut, the Biggest-Ever Foreign US Listing
Daily Woody
Korea's news, read between the lines — edited daily for the world
Thursday, July 9, 2026
Front Page
SK Hynix's $28 Billion Nasdaq Debut — the Biggest U.S. Listing a Foreign Company Has Ever Attempted
SK Hynix, the world's second-largest memory chipmaker and the leading supplier of the high-bandwidth memory that trains AI models, will begin trading on the Nasdaq on Friday under the ticker SKHY. It aims to raise about $28 billion by selling American depositary receipts, a sum second only to SpaceX's record $85.7 billion offering last month and larger than Alibaba's 2014 debut or Saudi Aramco's 2019 IPO. The final price is set Thursday in New York, based on the Seoul share price. Proceeds will fund fabrication plants at the Yongin cluster and ASML lithography machines. Early demand already outstripped the shares on offer, and analysts expect the stock to join the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, pulling in passive inflows.
Korea Context
This is not a traditional IPO. SK Hynix is already listed in Seoul (ticker 000660); the Nasdaq move is a secondary listing via depositary receipts, giving U.S. funds direct access to a stock they could previously reach only through Korea. The subtext is the “Korea discount”: Korean chipmakers have long traded below U.S. peers such as Micron. Management's stated hope is that New York lets the company's “true corporate value” be priced.
Between the Lines
The timing carries its own argument. A company lists where it believes it will be valued most richly, and SK Hynix is crossing the Pacific at the moment its Seoul shares have run up more than 600% in a year and briefly overtook Samsung by market value for the first time since 2000. Listing into that peak locks in a rich price for the seller. It also hands U.S. investors the stock precisely when the memory trade looks most stretched.
That tension is not abstract today. Even as SK Hynix courts New York, Korean chip stocks fell into a bear market this week, and the same names anchor the KOSPI's plunge in the card beside this one. The listing is a bet that AI demand for memory keeps compounding fast enough to justify tens of billions in new capacity; the sell-off is the market pricing the opposite risk. Both are wagers on a single question — how long the boom lasts — and on Friday, one of them opens for public trading.
Samsung's Record $58bn Quarter Tops Nvidia
Samsung Electronics guided to an operating profit of 89.4 trillion won (about $58.4 billion) on 171 trillion won in revenue for the April–June quarter — up more than 1,800% from a year earlier and its third straight record. The figure surpasses the best quarters ever posted by Nvidia (about $53.5 billion) and Apple ($50.9 billion), making it the highest quarterly operating profit any technology company has reported. One quarter's profit exceeded Samsung's combined operating profit for the past three years. Stripping out some 20 trillion won set aside for employee bonuses, the number would have cleared 100 trillion won. Yet the shares fell more than 6% on the day, as investors focused on AI-capex and demand risk rather than the print.
「Sources ↗」 Korea Times · CNBC
Korea's ‘Black Wednesday’: KOSPI Sheds 5.35%
The KOSPI closed Wednesday down 409.52 points at 7,246.79, its worst session in weeks, with the tech-heavy KOSDAQ off 5.56% and back below 800 for the first time in ten months. Sell-side circuit breakers hit both boards for a second straight day. Chip-cycle jitters met the afternoon's Middle East news; Samsung and SK Hynix now sit up to 30% below their one-month highs. After hours, the damage deepened as Trump's Iran remarks landed — Samsung fell 9.8% in night trading, SK Hynix briefly cracked the 2 million won line.
International
Trump Says the Iran Ceasefire Is ‘Over’
The president's own words put a question mark over a truce his administration brokered barely three weeks ago.
Speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara on Wednesday, Trump was asked whether the memorandum of understanding with Iran still held. “I think it's over. I don't want to deal with them anymore,” he said, calling further talks a waste of time while stopping short of declaring full-scale war. The remarks followed an overnight exchange of strikes: after Iran attacked three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. hit some 80 targets and reimposed oil sanctions, and Iran struck U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. He left the door ajar for his negotiators to keep talking.
Between the Lines
The deal was built to be walked back. The mid-June MOU stopped the fighting and reopened Hormuz, but left the strait's control and traffic rules for a later 60-day negotiation that never resolved them. A framework that defers the hardest questions can be re-litigated the moment either side wants leverage — and a single overnight clash was enough to bring the whole thing to the edge.
For Korea, the exposure is direct. Brent crude jumped roughly 6% on the remarks, and Seoul imports nearly all its crude, much of it through Hormuz. That is why a sentence spoken in Ankara showed up in Korean after-hours trading before it reached most front pages: the same chip stocks debuting and plunging on this page carry an oil-price exposure too.
China's DeepSeek Moves to Build Its Own AI Chip
The startup that undercut Western AI on cost now wants to cut its dependence on both Nvidia and Huawei.
Reuters reported that DeepSeek has spent about a year developing an inference-focused AI chip and is in talks with design, foundry and memory partners. Until now it has leaned on Nvidia's export-compliant chips and Huawei's Ascend; an in-house design would reduce both dependencies at once. Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance have taken similar steps, and in the U.S. OpenAI has unveiled an inference chip built with Broadcom. The harder part is not the design but manufacturing at scale — advanced foundry capacity and high-bandwidth memory that U.S. controls are meant to keep out of Chinese hands. Which foundry, if any, agrees to produce the chip will be the real test of whether those controls still bite.
「Sources ↗」 Taipei Times (Reuters)
Fed's June Minutes Show a Committee Split on Rates
The first minutes of the Warsh era reveal how sharply policymakers disagree on the next move.
Minutes of the June 16–17 FOMC meeting, released Wednesday, show officials weighing both a cut and a hike. A few argued there was a case to raise rates, citing energy and supply shocks, while most warned that strong AI-infrastructure demand could keep inflation elevated. The committee held the benchmark at 3.50–3.75% unanimously. Chair Kevin Warsh, in his first meeting, halved the statement's length, dropped forward guidance, and did not submit his own rate projection. Markets now watch this month's meeting for whether a hike reaches the table.
「Sources ↗」 Herald Economy · Financial News
Korea
Digital-Speech Law Takes Effect; Opposition Vows a Constitutional Challenge
A new law lets courts levy up to five-fold damages for knowingly spreading harmful falsehoods — and reignites a free-speech fight.
The revised Information and Communications Network Act, effective Monday, allows damages of up to five times the loss when someone knowingly spreads false or manipulated information to harm another, and fines of up to 1 billion won (about $650,000) for repeatedly circulating content already ruled illegal. The conservative People Power Party calls it a “gag law” and has pledged a constitutional complaint; the ruling Democratic Party dismisses that as obstruction.
Korea Context
Korea's constitutional complaints require the challenger to show they are directly and presently affected. On a law's first day, “we dislike it” rarely clears that bar — so its constitutionality will likely be tested only once real enforcement cases accumulate.
Between the Lines
The quieter stake is the chilling effect. Legal and civic groups warn that “false or manipulated information” is defined loosely enough that people unsure whether their own speech qualifies may simply say less. That self-censorship never shows up in prosecution counts, which makes it the easiest consequence to overlook when judging what the law actually does.
Lee's NATO Debut: a ‘Defense Partnership 2.0’
At the same Ankara summit, President Lee Jae Myung made his NATO debut with a keynote proposing a “defense-industry partnership 2.0” — moving beyond arms sales toward joint research, production and operation — and opened talks on a framework accord to enter NATO's joint-procurement market, which Seoul's security office estimates at 15 trillion won a year. He met Trump on naval shipbuilding and agreed to a Washington visit, and held a first summit with Ukraine's Zelenskyy, outlining $100 million in aid. For a country whose defense exports have surged since 2022, the goal is to embed K-defense inside NATO's supply chain rather than sell to it from outside.
「Sources ↗」 Kyunghyang · Hankook Ilbo
Brief
[Newspim] The Asian Development Bank raised its 2026 growth forecast for Korea to 2.6% from 1.9%, citing strength in AI and semiconductors.
[Etoday] Canada named Germany's TKMS preferred bidder for its multi-billion-dollar submarine program, sidelining a Hanwha Ocean–HD Hyundai bid.
[Newspim] France's Marine Le Pen saw her sentence reduced on appeal, reopening a path to a presidential run — though an ankle-monitor condition leaves it uncertain.
[YTN] Korea's July extra session opens with an election-commission special-counsel bill, as the ruling and opposition parties clash over who nominates the counsel.
Weather
Thursday brings clouds and rain across much of Korea, with heavy downpours, gusts and thunder in the greater Seoul area, Chungcheong and the Jeolla provinces. Rain eases overnight in the center and south. Daytime highs of 25–34°C keep the heat in place. (KMA, issued 5 a.m. July 9)
| Thu 9 | Fri 10 | Sat 11 | Sun 12 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Low (°C) | · | 21–25 | 22–25 | 22–27 |
| High (°C) | 25–34 | 28–34 | 30–36 | 30–36 |
Rainfall through Fri 10 · Seoul/Incheon/Gyeonggi 30–80mm (locally 120mm+) · Daejeon/Sejong/Chungnam/southern Chungbuk 80–150mm (locally 200mm+) · Jeonbuk/northwest Jeonnam 80–150mm (locally 200mm+). Watch for flooding in low-lying areas.
Editorial
Today's front page is a single wager, seen from two sides. On Friday, SK Hynix lists in New York, betting that the world's hunger for AI memory will keep compounding fast enough to justify tens of billions in new capacity. The same day this listing was priced, the stocks that carry it fell into a bear market, and the KOSPI shed more than 5% — the market pricing the opposite risk on the very names about to debut abroad. Conviction and doubt, wearing the same jersey. Then, from Ankara, a third voice: the U.S. president calling his Iran truce “over,” sending oil up 6% and reaching Korean after-hours trading before it hit most headlines. None of this settles the question the whole page is asking — how long the boom lasts. It only raises the stakes on the answer. What Korea has to watch is not which way to lean, but which facts would actually tell it the cycle has turned.
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