SK hynix briefly tops Samsung as Korea’s most valuable company—and it’s reportedly eyeing a U.S. listing as soon as August

For one day, at least, South Korea had a new most valuable company.

SK hynix, one of the world’s largest producers of memory chips, surpassed Samsung Electronics in market capitalization on Monday. After a 5.6% surge in its share price, SK hynix was worth over 2.1 quadrillion won ($1.35 trillion), just ahead of Samsung at $1.34 trillion.

Samsung retook the top spot on Tuesday, after SK hynix’s shares slumped nearly 12.5% as part of a broad tech sell-off. Samsung’s shares dropped 12.3%, while the KOSPI index also dropped 10%.

Still, SK hynix’s rise to the top is a rapid change for a company that, at one point, was lost in the wilderness as a struggling electronics maker, spun off from Hyundai in 2003 and acquired by SK in 2011. 

SK hynix is now the world’s leading producer of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), key to the manufacture of AI processors and graphics processing units made by companies like Nvidia. The company controls about 58% of the HBM market as measured by revenue, according to Counterpoint Research. Samsung and Micron Technologies sit........

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