SK Hynix (SKHY) shares fell 9.32% on Tuesday, with the Seoul-listed stock dropping to ₩1,746,000, extending a two-day selloff that followed its record-breaking Nasdaq debut.
The company listed its American Depository Receipts on Nasdaq on July 10, closing that session at $168.01 — up 13% on the day. The IPO raised $26.5 billion, one of the largest ADR listings on record.
That debut euphoria didn’t last long.
By July 13, Seoul-listed shares had dropped 15.4%, their worst single day since the listing. Tuesday brought another leg down, with the stock swinging nearly 5% higher in early trade before reversing sharply.
Three major Korean brokerages — Korea Investment Securities, Mirae Asset Securities, and Hyundai Motor Securities — all cut their Q2 operating profit estimates for SK Hynix. The common thread: lower-than-expected average selling prices for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips and softer DRAM bit growth.
That’s a meaningful hit to sentiment given how much of SK Hynix’s bull case rests on HBM pricing. Industry data suggests HBM4 prices could reach $4 to $5 per gigabit by 2027, up from around $2 per gigabit in the second half of 2026.
The valuation gap between U.S. and Korean-listed shares is adding more pressure. The ADR now trades at more than a 20% premium to the Seoul stock, which has pushed domestic investors to sell local shares and rotate into the Nasdaq-listed ADRs.
Daniel Yoo, global strategist at Yuanta Securities, described the domestic decline as a “corrective period,” calling the dynamic “additional share issuance” from the market’s perspective.
Despite the short-term turbulence, the underlying financials are hard to argue with. Revenue in Q1 2026 came in at KRW 52.58 trillion ($35.05 billion), up 198% year-over-year. Net profit jumped 397.6% to KRW 40.35 trillion ($26.89 billion).
SK Hynix holds a multi-year supply partnership with Nvidia (NVDA) for advanced HBM chips. The company is also locking in three-to-five year agreements with tier-one AI clients as hyperscalers like Google, Meta (META), and Amazon (AMZN) compete for memory supply.
The company is building a $4 billion chip plant in Indiana and expanding a fabrication cluster in Yongin, South Korea, valued at $390 billion.
Jim Cramer weighed in positively, saying the memory chips trade at a premium while the stock trades at a discount. He acknowledged the cyclical risk but suggested investors could take a small position and buy into weakness.
The broader market offered no support Tuesday. The Nasdaq fell 1.6% and the S&P 500 dropped 0.8%. The KOSPI remained under pressure following a circuit breaker event Monday — the seventh such halt this year — after the index fell nearly 9% amid geopolitical stress following U.S. military strikes on Iran.
SK Hynix Chairman Chey Tae-won has said he sees no signs of demand slowing and believes AI could break the traditional boom-bust cycle in memory markets.
Brokerage downgrades on Q2 earnings estimates remain the most immediate pressure on the stock.
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