South Korean billionaire's risky bet pays off, as SK Hynix debuts in New York

By Hyunjoo Jin

SEOUL, July 10 (Reuters) - When South Korean billionaire Chey Tae-won attends a bell-ringing ceremony on Friday for SK Hynix's $26.5 billion Nasdaq listing, it will mark the ultimate payoff of a bet many once considered risky: buying a loss-making chipmaker that has since become an AI powerhouse.

SK Group's 2012 acquisition of Hynix was viewed as problematic even within the business conglomerate: Memory chips are cyclical and capital-intensive, and the company was losing money while trailing Samsung Electronics in market share and technology.

But under Chey, seeking an edge over Samsung, SK Hynix has spent more than a decade betting on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, at the time a niche technology. The wager paid off as HBM became a critical component in Nvidia's AI accelerators, helping SK Hynix emerge as the world's biggest producer of the chip.

"SK is our largest memory partner. Without SK's partnership, today's AI industry would not have developed as wonderfully as it has," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told reporters in Seoul in June, with the 65-year-old Chey standing beside him.

Kim Dae-il, a former SK Hynix board member and economics professor at Seoul National University, said Chey promoted executives from within Hynix rather than bringing in managers from the SK Group. He credited Park Sung-wook, a longtime chip engineer, who was appointed as CEO in 2013, with refusing to give up on HBM even amid skepticism among board members.

"There was enormous investment behind SK Hynix's rise to that position. Ultimately, Chairman Chey's achievement was making the right bets and putting the right people in place," Kim said.

SK Hynix and SK Group did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.

CONCERNS OVER SLOWER AI SPENDING

Yet even as SK Hynix rides the AI boom, Chey, who studied physics at Korea University and undertook postgraduate work in economics at the University of Chicago, faces growing concerns that demand may not keep pace with soaring memory prices.

"We are facing a shortage of memory supply, which in some ways is a welcome problem for me," Chey said in a speech in April.

"People may say, 'Isn't it good because you're making a lot of money?' But this situation cannot last forever," he said.

Last week, both SK Hynix and Samsung announced pledges to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new South Korean chip plants to meet surging demand after President Lee Jae Myung called for measures to narrow regional economic divides.

But the expansion plans also raised concerns about potential oversupply in the highly cyclical memory industry.

Chey, chairman of SK Group, a sprawling conglomerate whose business ranges from telecom to refinery and construction, is not a direct shareholder of SK Hynix. But he is the largest shareholder of SK Inc, which holds a 32% stake in SK Hynix's top shareholder, SK Square. His wealth is estimated at $5.4 billion, according to Forbes.

OUTLIER

Chey's prominence reflects a style that sets him apart from many South Korean tycoons, who typically avoid public attention.

His career has repeatedly been marked by controversy and personal setbacks. Yet as SK Hynix takes centre stage in the AI boom, the legacy of the businessman once criticized for buying a struggling chipmaker is increasingly being defined by one of the most successful bets in South Korean corporate history.

In 2015, Chey sent a letter to a local newspaper in which he publicly admitted he had become estranged from his then-wife and had a child with another woman who gave him emotional comfort.

The letter, unusually candid for a Korean chaebol leader, divided public opinion in a society where extramarital relationships remain deeply stigmatized.

Chey is now locked in an acrimonious divorce settlement lawsuit, with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in a case that could affect ownership of South Korea's second-largest conglomerate after Samsung Group.

His career has also not been without controversy. Chey spent more than two years in prison for embezzling corporate funds before receiving a presidential pardon in 2015. At the time, the government said the decision to free Chey and other business leaders was intended to give them a chance to help develop the country's economy.

($1 = 1,503.7700 won)

(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Tomasz Janowski)