Market Issues

On 7 September Korea resolved to make a 22 billion dollar, 6.3 gigawatt gas complex at Encinal, Texas the first project under its 350 billion dollar investment package. No listed company owes anything: the money moves through a state vehicle. The package exists to protect a tariff ceiling, and the tariff most coverage cites does not do what it is said to do. The Section 232 action of 14 January 2026 charges 25 per cent on a narrow band of logic parts aimed at Nvidia and AMD accelerators, carries seven end-use exceptions and contains no country ceiling; Korean memory is not in it. The live exposure is a broader measure that has been signalled but not published, whose rate Commerce Secretary Lutnick has said may be linked to how much a company invests in American manufacturing. That is what makes a Texas gas plant a semiconductor story.

Korea’s financial regulator and its exchange have put 42 institutions and 55 listed companies behind a single three-week programme aimed at foreign investors, running 28 September to 16 October. Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are presenting. But the sessions that decide whether a foreign fund can hold Korean stock without a workaround are the policy … Read more

Korean coverage now prices the memory build-out in thousands of trillions of won. We went looking for the announcements that carry both an amount and a date, and found four, all from SK hynix: 9.4 trillion won in July 2024, 21.6 trillion in February 2026, and 35.2 and 19.1 trillion on 7 August 2026, plus 3.87 billion dollars in Indiana. They total 85.3 trillion won and every target in them is a clean room date rather than a production date, with the earliest in February 2027 and the two largest in December 2028 and June 2029. Samsung has published no equivalent, so we print no figure for it, and we withhold the programme totals circulating without a company document behind them.

SK hynix told the Korea Exchange on 5 August 2026 that Solidigm is reviewing options and that nothing has been finalised, after reporting said the American subsidiary was raising money ahead of a Nasdaq listing. The parent has already listed: ADRs priced at 149 dollars on 9 July, raised 26.5 billion dollars, and have traded under SKHY since the following morning. The subsidiary has not, and the one checkable signal behind the rumour is a job advertisement that serves bond issuance just as well as an IPO. We separate what the filing confirms from what only unnamed banking sources have said, and mark the date the company bound itself to.

CXMT listed in Shanghai on 27 July 2026 and closed 465.82 per cent above its offer price. Its volume process is where Samsung and SK hynix were in 2019, and on high bandwidth memory it is two generations behind. Korean memory shares had their worst session of the month two weeks before the listing, for reasons that had nothing to do with it.