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 fro

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 believes those bearish reports may have cost the deal and that the office will be more cautious publishing similar views going forward.