By Abhishek Vishnoi | Updated on Oct 07, 2026 at 02:01 PM
SK Hynix Inc.’s US-listed shares face a test on Wednesday, when a lockup that prevented the firm, its affiliates and management from selling shares expires, another potential catalyst for a market already questioning how much further the memory boom can run.
While there’s no indication that SK Hynix is planning to return to the market with an additional issuance — like some Asian artificial intelligence names did recently — the company’s American depositary receipts fell the most in three weeks on Monday. The ADRs trade at a premium of 38% to the Korean shares as of Tuesday’s close, the highest among major Asian issuers tracked by Bloomberg, and remain more than 20% above their listing price despite a recent pullback.
Any additional supply would test demand at that premium, just as investors are fretting over the outlook for the memory-chip boom and rising competition from. Shares of SK Hynix, Micron Technology Inc., and Samsung Electronics Co. slid between 7.7% and 33% in the three months ended September, as worries over the durability of AI spending and memory demand took some shine off the sector.
“The lockup expiry is not a fundamental problem, but it does provide a technical reason to sell into an already cautious market, said Gary Tan, a portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments. “Our focus will be on how the ADR premium evolves after the lockup expiry as a gauge of underlying investor demand.”
Any sustained narrowing of the ADR premium could reinforce concerns that overseas demand for SK Hynix is weakening and potentially feed back into price discovery in its home market. The company’s Seoul-listed shares fell as much as 2.8% on Wednesday to their lowest since Sept. 16.
“If the ADR stays materially below the Seoul equivalent after the actual expiry, that could put some pressure on the local shares through sentiment and cross-market price discovery,” said Sanghyun Park, founder of Clepsydra Capital.