MORGAN STANLEY was not selected as the sole lead underwriter for SK Hynix’s US
ADR listing, a deal sized at about $26.5 billion (roughly 40 trillion won) — the
largest foreign IPO in the US by scale. At an assumed 0.5% underwriting fee the
commission totals roughly $130 million. The final syndicate is Bank of America,
CITIGROUP, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. Inside MORGAN STANLEY the loss is viewed
as a reputational setback; the bank had recently won mandates on SpaceX and
ANTHROPIC and was a frontrunner for an OpenAI listing. Market participants
largely attribute MORGAN STANLEY’s exclusion to its repeated bearish Korea
semiconductor research, including a well-known “memory winter” analysis. Several
bankers, including former MORGAN STANLEY executives, say the firm’s Seoul office
increasingly believe those bearish reports may have cost the deal and that the
office will be more cautious publishing similar views going forward.
