SK Hynix Overtakes Samsung as South Korea's Most Valuable Company

• Early 2000s: From near-collapse to survival
• 2023–2024: Betting on AI memory in a downturn
• 2025–2026: Market share and valuation shift
• Competing perspectives on the shift

SK Hynix Overtakes Samsung as South Korea’s Most Valuable Company South Korea’s corporate landscape has been upended as SK Hynix, once a debt-burdened underdog, has overtaken long-dominant Samsung to become the country’s most valuable company, driven by the global rush to power artificial intelligence.

§Early 2000s: From near-collapse to survival

Two decades ago, Hynix Semiconductor — SK Hynix’s predecessor — was close to collapse under heavy debt, a stark contrast to Samsung Electronics, which had already secured its place as South Korea’s leading tech champion and stock-market heavyweight.

§2023–2024: Betting on AI memory in a downturn

During a memory industry downturn in 2023, SK Hynix continued pouring money into developing high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, even as falling prices pushed the firm into an annual operating loss of 7.73 trillion won (about $5.02 billion). That contrarian investment meant that when AI infrastructure spending surged in 2024, SK Hynix was ready with advanced HBM stacks tightly integrated with AI processors, giving it both higher barriers to entry and greater pricing power than conventional memory products.

As cloud and AI leaders including Microsoft, Google, Meta, Nvidia and Alphabet’s Google ramped up deployments of AI data centers, SK Hynix’s HBM business turned the company around, driving a record operating profit of 23.5 trillion won (about $15.26 billion) in 2024.

§2025–2026: Market share and valuation shift

By 2025, SK Hynix had captured around 61% of the global HBM market, compared with Samsung’s 17% and Micron’s 21%, solidifying its technological and commercial lead in AI memory.

On June 22, 2026, SK Hynix shares jumped 5.6%, lifting its market capitalization to 2,080.4 trillion won (about $1.35 trillion), edging past Samsung Electronics at 2,066.7 trillion won (about $1.34 trillion). Reporting highlighted that SK Hynix, now a key HBM supplier to Nvidia and Google, had ended Samsung’s run as South Korea’s most valuable company, a position Samsung had held since 2000 and through most of the pre-AI era.

§Competing perspectives on the shift

From SK Hynix’s standpoint, the milestone confirms that specialization in AI-era components, particularly HBM, can overturn long-established hierarchies in the chip industry. For Samsung, the shift underscores the cost of being relatively slower in high-end HBM despite its broader semiconductor portfolio and historic dominance.

For global investors and AI platform companies, the reversal signals that the center of gravity in value creation is moving toward firms that can supply the specialized memory underpinning large-scale AI models — and that even entrenched giants like Samsung can be outpaced when technology cycles turn.

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