SK Hynix Overtakes Samsung as South Korea's No. 1 Stock

For the first time since November 2000, South Korea has a new most valuable company. Nikkei Asia reported on June 22 that SK Hynix passed Samsung Electronics in market capitalization during intraday trading, pushing its valuation to roughly 2 quadrillion won, or about $1.3 trillion, according to KED Global. Shares rose more than 5% on the day, the eighth consecutive winning session, as investors priced in what the financials had already been signaling: SK Hynix is now the dominant supplier of high-bandwidth memory for AI infrastructure.

As The Next Web noted, SK Hynix has spent two years as the dominant supplier of high-bandwidth memory for Nvidia's accelerators, commanding the majority of segment revenue in recent quarters. The AI training buildout has made that position enormously lucrative: in the first quarter of 2026, SK Hynix posted an operating profit of 37.61 trillion won ($25.4 billion) at a 72% operating margin, according to KED Global. The company has also said demand for its next-generation HBM4 chips is projected to exceed its own capacity for the next three years.

There are a couple of things the milestone headline doesn't fully capture. The market cap comparison is based on common shares only; when Samsung's preferred shares, worth roughly 180 trillion won, are included, Samsung remains larger in total value. And the profit story had already turned earlier: in January 2026, SK Hynix surpassed Samsung in annual profit for the first time, so this market cap crossing is more a culmination than a sudden reversal.

What the reporting doesn't give you is clarity on whether SK Hynix held the top position at market close or only intraday, and there is no account of Samsung's timeline for closing the HBM technology gap. Analysts cited by KED Global noted that SK Hynix "may have further to run," but a 72% operating margin is historically exceptional, and its durability depends on sustained AI hardware demand and Nvidia's continued reliance on a single primary HBM partner.