By Adam Clark

SK Hynix stock is officially heading stateside. The South Korean company is about to provide an intriguing alternative to Micron Technology for U.S. investors looking to jump on the memory-chip boom.

SK Hynix said Wednesday that it had filed an application to list American depositary receipts with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The size and pricing of the listing haven't been decided, but SK Hynix could raise up to $10 billion according to local Korean media reports. It currently has a market valuation of around $445 billion, with shares in Seoul having more than quadrupled in value in the past 12 months.

U.S. investors will therefore soon have the chance to play both Micron and SK Hynix as memory-chip demand booms, driven by the need for high-bandwidth memory as components in artificial-intelligence chips.

SK Hynix stock closed up 0.9% in South Korean trading on Wednesday while Micron was down 4% in early trading. Micron has now fallen around 18% in the past five trading sessions.

SK Hynix has plenty to recommend it. It is slightly cheaper than Micron, trading at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of around 4.9 times, according to FactSet. By comparison, Micron trades at a forward multiple of around 5.2 times.

The two companies have extremely similar market capitalizations despite SK Hynix having a larger sales base, expected at around $163 billion this year, compared with Micron's $126 billion. That also translates into a bigger profit, with SK Hynix's adjusted net income expected at $90.6 billion for 2026, against $79.2 billion for Micron, although Micron's margin looks slightly stronger on those forecasts.

SK Hynix has a narrow lead in dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, with a 34% share of the market as of the third quarter of 2025, beating Micron's 26%, Counterpoint Research figures say.

However, the dominance is more pronounced in high-bandwidth memory, where SK Hynix has 57% of the market compared with Micron's 21%, according to Counterpoint.

On the other hand, investing in SK Hynix's ADRs will bring currency and political risks. So far SK Hynix and its domestic peer Samsung Electronics have avoided facing U.S. tariffs on imported chips but the Trump administration has repeatedly suggested it could impose levies on overseas production unless chip makers ramp up U.S. investment. South Korean stocks have also been hit by surging energy prices in recent weeks due to the country's heavy reliance on liquefied natural gas.

A broader question is whether investing in SK Hynix would provide meaningful diversification for Micron shareholders. As Barron's has written, the memory-chip business is historically cyclical, with periods of undersupply followed by oversupply, leading to a fall across the sector.

Currently there is a severe shortage of memory chips with no significant new supply expected before 2027. However, Micron is expected to begin wafer output from a $50 billion expansion of its facilities in Idaho around the middle of next year. SK Hynix's $21 billion Yongin cluster should reach volume production in late 2027, followed by further additions in 2028 and Micron's $100 billion New York project in 2030.

Both Micron and SK Hynix are hot stocks now but their streak isn't guaranteed to last.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

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March 25, 2026 10:08 ET (14:08 GMT)

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