SK Hynix Denies Decision on Chongqing Plant Sale

SK Hynix has denied making any specific decisions about selling its stake in the Chongqing semiconductor packaging plant. When asked to disclose information by the Korea Exchange on August 10, the company stated that they are reviewing various measures to enhance the competitiveness of their packaging business, but no decisions have been finalized yet.

This response comes after foreign media and industry sources reported that SK Hynix is exploring strategic options, including potentially selling its stake in the Chongqing plant.

The estimated corporate value of the Chongqing plant, if a stake sale were to occur, is around $3 billion, or approximately 4 trillion won in Korean currency. Potential acquisition candidates include Chinese investment funds and local semiconductor companies. The investigation into the future operational direction of the Chongqing plant is currently being conducted with advisors.

The transaction options under consideration range from selling the entire stake to retaining a minority stake while maintaining a cooperative relationship with the buyer.

The Chongqing plant serves as SK Hynix's core back-end processing facility in China, responsible for cutting and packaging chips from wafers and testing their performance. The review of the shareholding structure is seen as part of a broader reorganization of global production bases and efforts to improve the efficiency of their packaging business.

With the growing importance of advanced packaging technologies, such as high bandwidth memory (HBM), in the rapidly expanding artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor market, industry analysts suggest that SK Hynix's review may also reflect an intention to reallocate resources towards high-value-added products centered on back-end processing.

However, there has been no official announcement linking the review of the Chongqing plant sale to plans for increased investment in advanced packaging technologies. SK Hynix has stated that they will provide further details when specific information is finalized, which could be within one month. As the final decisions regarding the sale, transaction structure, and scale of the stake have not been determined, the company expects that the actual direction of the business restructuring will become clearer through their upcoming re-disclosure.