A top US asset management company, Capital Group, is steadily increasing its shares in SK Hynix, despite poor performance from the world’s lead semiconductor manufacturer, Samsung Electronics.
According to the Financial Supervisory Service’s electronic disclosure system, Capital Group announced that it has 6.08% of SK Hynix’s shares as of December 4, 2018. The “simple acquisition”, according to Capital Group, is one of a series of public purchases since it announced that it had shares in the company in September (5.05%).
Capital Group, along with Fidelity and Vanguard, is considered one of the top three asset managers in the US. Hyundai Motor, and Hana Financial Holdings have more than 5% of shares in Korea. Although it had more than 5% of Samsung Electronics’ shares, it was excluded from the list of public disclosures when it sold some of its shares.
The Capital Group’s increased investment in SK Hynix seems to be based on the judgment that the semiconductor market, which has suffered from the super boom, will not plummet. In fact, experts expect that the memory semiconductor industry will be able to make adjustments and revive demands starting from the second half of this year.
“We expect that supply and demand for memory businesses will gradually stabilize as demands increase due to effects of peak seasons, expansion of new CPUs, and impact of release of new Smartphones in the second half of this year.”
Samsung Electronics
Meanwhile, SK Hynix is going to announce its fourth quarter performance on the 24th of last year.
“SK Hynix’s sales in the fourth quarter of last year will fall 17 percent from the previous quarter to $8.47B USD (9.5T won) and its operating profit will fall 27% to $4.1B USD (4.7 trillion won).”
Lee Soo-bin, researcher at Daishin Securities Co.
