00:00At three of your morning calls, let's get to SK Hynix. The ADRs begin trading on the NASDAQ today,
00:05the company raising more than $26 billion, the largest first-time share sale by a foreign company
00:11in US history. Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow joins us now for more before he heads off to the NASDAQ.
00:17Ed, good to see you. What do you make of the issue? Yeah, look, there's clearly demand,
00:21you know, heading towards $200 billion of demand for a $26.5 billion deal. When we talk about it
00:26being oversubscribed, that's how I'd frame it in the dollar terms. And, you know, clearly they need
00:31the capital, right? They are committed both in Korea and probably here in the United States
00:36to building out memory capacity. They have a 57% market share in high bandwidth memory. But right
00:43now, you just take the memory market in aggregate, HBM is like single digits. But because of the
00:49pricing in dollar terms, it's so much bigger than that. So they're going to have to work out their
00:54capital strategy. But really, it's about getting in front of the American investor that SK really
00:59believes understands the AI story better, because this is where so much of the AI story is playing
01:04out. Ed, it's hard to make that argument when you've seen the run-up in South Korea over the
01:08last year, no? Yeah, I mean, you know, the Korean market has been volatile. And even in the short
01:14term, in the last week, that volatility doesn't seem to have dissuaded the appetite of US investors.
01:20What's interesting about SK in particular, right, is if you think about fund managers around
01:24the world ex-Korea, it's very difficult for them to access that market. It was a very conscious
01:29decision for SK to price the ADR at a premium to the Korean shares, but they felt confident
01:35that they could do that, tap the demand without leaving money on the table. So, yeah, I think
01:40that the idea is that if you think about SK's footprint, what is it they got going on in
01:45California? They have their sales channels there, and they have their R&D there, their biggest
01:49customers are there, NVIDIA being king among them. So, it is about being in front of the
01:54American investor, but also the companies that are driving the infrastructure build out
01:58where that high bandwidth memory is going. The records keep dropping. Ed, thank you, buddy.
02:02And looking forward to the conversation later this morning, 10.30 Eastern time, from the
02:05NASDAQ, the SK Hynix chairman, catching up with Bloomberg's Etihad.
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