Key points
- SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won bought 3,620 SK Hynix shares in Seoul on July 30, 2026, for about 4.79 billion won ($3.33M USD). He has run the company since 2012 and had never owned a share of it.
- The purchase stopped just under 5 billion won, the size that forces a company insider to file a plan 30 days before trading. The Seoul Economic Daily read that as what let SK Hynix report the buy the same afternoon.
- He paid 1,322,000 won ($920 USD) a share, 55.7 percent below the 2,987,000 won ($2,079 USD) peak SK Hynix hit on June 25. The stock fell 5.64 percent that day and about 27 percent over three days.
- 3,620 shares out of some 730 million changes nothing about who owns SK Hynix, which is why it reads as a message rather than a purchase.
On Thursday, July 30, after the Seoul market had closed for the day, a notice went up on DART, the filing system every Korean listed company reports through. Chairman of SK Group, Chey Tae-won, had gone into the open market and bought 3,620 shares of SK Hynix.
Seoul closed SK Hynix at 1,322,000 won that day, about $920 a share. Chey's 3,620 of them came to 4.79 billion won. In dollars, about $3.33 million.
Chey has run SK Hynix since SK Group bought it in 2012, and in all that time he had never owned a share of it himself. What he owned was SK Square. SK Square holds 146.1 million SK Hynix shares, a fifth of the company, and Chey controls SK Square. The chain always worked. It just never had his name at the end of it. Thursday was the first time it did.
The size was picked on purpose
There is a line in the Korean rules at 5 billion won, about $3.48 million. Company insiders who buy or sell that much have to file a plan 30 days before they trade. Chey spent 4.79 billion won. He stopped about 210 million won short of the line, some $146,000 held back on a purchase more than twenty times that size.
The Seoul Economic Daily read the size and the timing together, saying the amount stayed under the line so that Chey could get a signal to the market quickly rather than file a plan and buy in late August. Announcing it 30 days early would have told Korean investors what the chairman intended to do next month. Reporting it on the day told them he had already done it, while the week's selling was still going on.
What the shares had done first
Thursday took another 79,000 won off the price. In percentage terms, 5.64. The two sessions before it had done much the same thing, and across the three the stock lost about 27 percent.
SK Hynix touched the highest price in its history on June 25. The number was 2,987,000 won, a bit over $2,000 a share. Five weeks on, 55.7 percent of it is gone. The company was briefly worth more than anything else on the Korean market, and it has now dropped back under 1,000 trillion won, somewhere near $696 billion.
The fall came after a quarter that broke records and still came in under what analysts had asked for, during a week when the Kospi stopped trading two days running for the first time. The index ended Thursday at 5,593.56, off 1.23 percent. It was also the day Korean individuals gave up and sold 1.43 trillion won of stock, near enough a billion dollars, while foreign investors came back to buy.
He also picked a country. SK Hynix has traded in Seoul for decades, and since July 10 it has traded in New York too, where what changes hands is a receipt standing in for the Seoul shares, ten receipts to one share, under the name SKHY. By Thursday afternoon in New York those receipts were going for about $148. You need ten of them to match a single Seoul share. That is $1,480 for the thing Chey paid $920 for.
He had already said it out loud
Chey made the argument in public two weeks before he acted on it. At the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry forum on Jeju Island on July 17, asked about the chip stocks, he said demand for memory was not going away.
"Memory will continue to be needed, so over time it goes up and to the right," he said, and added that "rather than buying and selling, holding on quietly is a good way to preserve your assets."
Several outlets have printed that quote next to Thursday's filing in a way that reads as though he said it about the purchase. He did not. There were two weeks and 520,000 won between the speech and the filing. SK Hynix was at 1,842,000 won on Jeju, near $1,300 a share. It was at 1,322,000 won on the day he bought. Anyone who took the advice that morning is down about 28 percent, and he bought at the lower number.
What it is not
3,620 shares is not a stake. Set against 730 million shares, it is far too small to move anything about who controls SK Hynix, and Chey made no attempt to. A company official told Korean reporters the purchase was part of responsible management, which is the phrase Korean company leaders reach for when the gesture is the point.
That is the fair way to read it. One filing does not stop the selling, does not fix what has gone wrong in the chip market, and does not tell anyone where the bottom is. What it does is put a name, a date and a price in writing. The price was 1,322,000 won, and the man who signed for it is the one who sees SK Hynix's customer orders before anybody else does.
Won figures are converted at 1,437 won to the dollar, the July 30, 2026 rate. This article is for information only and is not investment advice.
