Chey Tae-won to SK Hynix Investors: Stop Trading, Just Hold

SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won has a blunt message for investors who keep churning SK Hynix shares: hold them. Rather than buying on strength and selling on the first wobble, he argued, shareholders would do better simply staying put — advice he framed around his own read of where artificial intelligence demand is heading.

The remark lands in a market where SK Hynix has become the most emotionally traded name on the Korean exchange. It is unusual for a controlling shareholder to comment this directly on retail trading behaviour, and the framing matters: this is a holding-period argument, not a price target.

Why the Chairman’s Read on AI Is the Load-Bearing Part

Strip away the trading advice and what remains is a demand thesis. Chey’s counsel to hold only makes sense if he believes the current memory cycle has a longer runway than a typical semiconductor upswing — that AI infrastructure buildout represents structural demand rather than a spike that mean-reverts within a few quarters.

That thesis has a concrete anchor in SK Hynix’s customer list. The company sits alongside Samsung Electronics and Micron in the trio that supplies the overwhelming majority of the world’s memory chips, and Nvidia is among its named customers ([X6]). In an AI accelerator, high-bandwidth memory is not an accessory — it is a gating component. A chipmaker positioned there is exposed to accelerator demand in a way that a conventional DRAM supplier is not.

The Numbers Behind the Patience Argument

SK Hynix closed fiscal 2024 with roughly ₩66.19 trillion in revenue and about ₩19.80 trillion in net profit ([X4]) — a net margin near 30 percent, extraordinary for a business historically defined by brutal cyclicality. The company employed 46,863 people that year and runs from headquarters in Icheon, southeast of Seoul ([X5]).

That profitability is precisely what makes the stock so volatile. Memory earnings swing violently with pricing, and investors who have watched previous cycles turn tend to sell into strength on the assumption that the peak is always closer than it looks. Chey’s argument is that this instinct, applied to the current cycle, costs money.

A Long Institutional Memory of Cycles

SK Group’s history with this asset gives the advice some weight. The chipmaker started life as Hyundai Electronics, launched by Hyundai Group’s founder in 1983, with a corporate lineage traceable to 1949 ([X2]). SK took ownership in 2003 and completed full integration under the current name in 2012 ([X3]) — an acquisition made when the memory business was a distressed asset, not a prize.

Chey himself has run SK since 1998, when he took over at 38 following the death of his father Chey Jong-hyun ([X12]). The group he leads is South Korea’s second largest conglomerate, spanning 186 subsidiaries ([X7]). Forbes valued his personal fortune at $4.7 billion as of July 2026 ([X9]). He has also chaired the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry since March 2021 ([X10]), a platform that has made him one of the more publicly audible figures in Korean business — though his record is not unblemished: a Seoul court sentenced him to four years in January 2013 over an embezzlement case involving more than $40 million, and he was pardoned in August 2015 ([X11]).

What Investors Should Actually Take From It

A chairman telling shareholders to hold is not a neutral statement, and it should not be read as one. Stable long-term ownership serves the controlling shareholder’s interests as much as the retail investor’s, and no executive commentary substitutes for a view on memory pricing, capital expenditure discipline, or how quickly competitors close the gap in high-bandwidth memory.

What the remark does supply is a data point on internal conviction. Chey is signalling that SK’s leadership views AI-driven memory demand as durable enough to justify sitting through volatility — a position that will be tested, not by rhetoric, but by the next few quarters of pricing and order books.