Key points
- Elice Group's first day on the Kosdaq
- Most of Elice's institutional shares had no lockup
- More Elice shares unlock next month
On October 20, Elice Group (엘리스그룹, 0158S0) closed its first day on the Kosdaq at 61,500 won ($46), down 32.04% from its IPO price of 90,500 won ($68). The GPU cloud company was valued at 1.005 trillion won ($757M) at the IPO price. Bizwatch (비즈워치) said that valuation made it the year's largest new Kosdaq listing by market value.
The stock opened at 75,700 won ($57), already 16.35% below the IPO price. The shares fell as low as 56,500 won ($43) before recovering a little near the close. At the closing price, Elice was worth about 684 billion won ($515M), by our calculations. The Kosdaq fell 3.33% the same day, and the Kospi fell 3.73%.
The weak debut followed strong demand during the IPO. More than 2,300 institutions took part in bookbuilding and bid for 388.84 times the shares on offer. Elice set its price at the top of its 70,400 to 90,500 won ($53 to $68) range. Retail investors then put down 10.26 trillion won ($7.7B) in deposits on October 7 and 8, according to Bizwatch.
Most institutional shares came with no lockup
A lockup is a promise not to sell shares for a set period after a listing. Institutions received 1,666,500 shares, or 75% of the offering. Of those, 68.7% came with no lockup at all, according to Elice's offering results report. Those shares could be sold from the first minute of trading. Another 20.2% were locked up for only 15 days.
Most of the older shareholders' stock can't be sold yet. Outside the shares sold in the IPO, only 0.81% of the company could trade on the first day, Bizwatch reported.
More shares unlock next month
Lockups for existing investors don't end all at once. Elice's October 6 prospectus lists about 1.33 million more shares becoming free to sell one month after the listing, nearly 12% of the company, by our calculations. That includes 723,102 shares held by Altos Korea Opportunity Fund 3, Elice's largest outside investor with a 19.49% stake.
Chief executive Kim Jae-won (김재원) owns 27.59% of the company. He and three other executives agreed not to sell any of their shares for two years.
Elice rents out Nvidia GPUs
Elice started in 2015 as an online coding education company. Today the company runs what the industry calls a neocloud, a cloud service that rents out Nvidia graphics processors, or GPUs, for training and running AI models. Elice's cloud revenue was 17.4 billion won ($13.1M) in all of 2025 and 26.1 billion won ($19.6M) in the first half of 2026 alone, Money Today (머니투데이) reported.
"Other neocloud companies build or lease data centers to set up their GPU clouds. Elice puts its neocloud inside the AI PMDC, a modular data center built from containers," an Elice investor relations official told Money Today. "A data center that takes 24 to 36 months to build is finished in three to six months with Elice's AI PMDC."
Almost all of the 201.1 billion won ($151M) the IPO raised is set aside for facilities, the results report shows. Elice planned before the IPO to spend most of the money on a modular AI data center.
Korean outlets point to AI worries
Bizwatch pointed to concerns about the finances of CoreWeave, a US company in the same business, along with Tuesday's broad selloff in Seoul. JoongAng Ilbo (중앙일보) also reported criticism that the IPO price was too high for Elice's actual value. First-half revenue was 34.4 billion won ($25.9M), and operating profit was 10.3 billion won ($7.8M).
Lee Jae-sung (이재성), a professor in the AI department at Chung-Ang University, told JoongAng Ilbo that worries about an AI bubble may hold the market back for a while. "During the DeepSeek shock, everyone said chip demand would fall, and that didn't happen," he said. "Demand for AI training and inference could keep growing in many areas, including physical AI, so we need to watch."
Meanwhile, two more companies are due to list on the Kosdaq on Thursday and Friday. Both set their offering prices before the market turned, Hankyung (한국경제) reported.
Quotes are translated from Korean. Won figures are converted at 1,328.4 won to the dollar, the Hana Bank rate shown on Naver Finance on October 20, 2026.
