SK Hynix Launches Record $28.6B Buyback and Cancellation After Shares Halve in Two Months

SK Hynix's board approved a plan to repurchase and cancel 40 trillion won of its own shares, about $28.6 billion, the largest treasury share cancellation in the history of South Korean listed companies. The program covers roughly 24.07 million shares, about 3.3% of shares outstanding, and runs from August 20 through November 19, with every acquired share to be retired on completion. The stock rose about 11% on the announcement.

The context is what makes this more than a routine capital return. SK Hynix shares had fallen more than 50% over the preceding two months despite record profits from AI memory demand, and the company and its peer Samsung Electronics have been under sustained investor pressure to return a larger share of that cash. SK Hynix also said it intends to revise its 2025-2027 shareholder return commitment upward, moving the benchmark from a ceiling of 50% of cumulative free cash flow to a floor above that level, which changes the framing from a cap on generosity to a minimum obligation.

Because the shares are cancelled rather than held in treasury, the share count reduction is permanent and flows straight through to per-share metrics. Wedbush characterized the move as a step toward closing the valuation gap between SK Hynix and comparable memory names, arguing the stock has traded at a discount despite the strength of the current DRAM and high-bandwidth-memory cycle . Index and ETF holders of the name see a mechanical benefit from the reduced float as the program executes.

For U.S. investors the read-through runs through the memory complex, where MU is the closest listed comparable and NVDA is the demand anchor pulling high-bandwidth-memory volumes. A buyback of this size signals management confidence that free cash flow through the cycle is durable enough to fund both capacity and capital returns, though it says nothing directly about pricing.

What to watch: the execution pace against the November 19 deadline, whether the revised shareholder-return floor is formalized with specific numbers, and whether Samsung responds with a comparable program now that the bar for Korean semiconductor capital returns has moved.

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