Key points
- SK Hynix's new Nasdaq stock, SKHY, traded around $185.60 Tuesday, up about 21% from Monday's close of $153.51.
- The same company's original Seoul shares (KRX: 000660) closed Tuesday at 1,913,000 won, up 3.68% from Monday, a real gain but nowhere near what the Nasdaq stock did.
- One SKHY share equals one-tenth of a Seoul share. Doing that math, and converting won to dollars, the Nasdaq stock is trading about 44% above where the Seoul shares say it should be.
- The Kospi itself rose only 0.73% Tuesday, even though SK Hynix and Samsung, more than 47% of the index by weight, both gained over 3%. The rest of the index stayed weak.
Same company, two stock prices, and today they moved very differently. SK Hynix's week-old Nasdaq stock jumped about 21% Tuesday. Its original stock in Seoul, the one that has traded for decades, gained less than 4%. I want to explain why the two prices are so different, because once you understand it, you will look at every other Korean company with a US listing a little differently.
What actually happened Tuesday
SK Hynix's Nasdaq-listed stock, ticker SKHY, traded around $185.60 Tuesday, up roughly 21% from Monday's close of $153.51. That is a big move for one day, for any stock. Meanwhile the company's home listing on the Korea Exchange, ticker 000660, closed Tuesday at 1,913,000 won, up 3.68% from Monday's 1,845,000 won. Both numbers are real gains. They are just very different sizes, for the exact same company.
The Kospi, Korea's main index, only rose 0.73% Tuesday. That might look strange next to SK Hynix and Samsung both climbing more than 3%, since those two stocks alone make up over 47% of the index. But the rest of the Kospi's stocks stayed weak, which pulled the overall number back down closer to flat. A calm two biggest stocks kept the index from falling. It did not push the index up much either.
Why one company has two stock prices
SKHY is what is called an ADR, an American Depositary Receipt. It is not a separate company. It is a US-listed certificate that represents shares of the real, Seoul-listed company, held on your behalf by a bank. SK Hynix set the exchange rate at ten to one: one SKHY share equals one-tenth of one Seoul share. So in theory, the two should always move together, adjusted for that ratio and for the won-to-dollar exchange rate.
Today they did not. Take Seoul's Tuesday close of 1,913,000 won, convert it to dollars at about 1,490 won per dollar, that is roughly $1,284 for one full Seoul share. Divide by ten for the ADR ratio, and SKHY should be worth about $128. It actually traded around $185.60. That is roughly a 44% premium, US buyers paying meaningfully more for the same underlying shares than what those shares are actually worth in Seoul.
Why the premium is this large
SKHY only started trading on July 9, five days before this article, in a debut some reports valued near $26.5 billion. It priced at $149 and closed its first day at $168.01. Very few Seoul shares have actually been converted into ADRs so far, reportedly under 3% of the total. When the supply of a stock is that limited and demand from US investors is strong, especially for a name tied so directly to AI memory chip demand, the price can run well ahead of where the underlying shares trade. Add in that Monday was SK Hynix's worst single day in years, a 15.4% crash tied to Korea's seventh circuit breaker of 2026, and some of Tuesday's bounce is just people buying back in after that scare, on a very new, thinly available stock. Thin supply plus a fast turnaround is a combination that moves a price hard in either direction.
What to watch
Differences like this usually shrink over time, as more Seoul shares get converted into ADRs and more traders buy the cheaper one while selling the more expensive one. Watch whether SKHY's premium over its Seoul value narrows in the coming weeks, that would tell you the newness of the listing was the real driver. If the premium holds or grows, US investors are placing a genuinely different value on holding SK Hynix through a Nasdaq ticker instead of a Seoul one.
Sources
- Price data via Yahoo Finance, SKHY, 000660.KS and KRW/USD
- Our earlier coverage, Monday's Kospi crash and seventh circuit breaker
- Our earlier coverage, Tuesday's wild Kospi open
- Our earlier coverage, why the Kospi moves so violently
- SK Hynix newsroom, SK hynix ships world's first 12-layer HBM4 samples to customers
This is general market commentary and opinion, not investment advice. Prices are intraday as of Tuesday, July 14, 2026 and will keep moving, especially for a stock as newly listed and thinly traded as SKHY. Always do your own research and consider speaking with a licensed financial professional before making any investment decision.