A leveraged exchange-traded fund tracking SK Hynix Inc. began trading in Hong Kong on Thursday, marking the world’s first such product linked to the South Korean memory chip giant and underscoring strong investor appetite for artificial intelligence-driven semiconductor plays.
The CSOP SK Hynix Daily (2x) Leveraged Product, managed by Hong Kong-based CSOP Asset Management Ltd., aims to deliver twice the daily return of SK Hynix’s share price using a swap-based synthetic replication strategy, CSOP said in a statement.
It was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at about HK$7.80 ($1) per unit, with a management fee of 1.6% and a minimum trading lot of 100 shares.
The ETF follows the strong performance of Seoul-listed SK Hynix, whose shares have soared 145% this year, fueled by booming demand for its high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in AI systems.
The company is the world’s largest HBM supplier to Nvidia Corp., the world’s most valuable AI chip company.
The ETF’s debut comes about five months after CSOP launched similar leveraged and inverse ETFs tied to Samsung Electronics Co. in May, the world’s first single-stock ETFs linked to a Korean company.
“Leveraged exposure to SK Hynix allows investors to capture the company’s strong performance in the AI-driven semiconductor cycle without the complexity of futures or margin trading,” said Ding Chen, chief executive of CSOP.
CSOP, the second-largest ETF issuer in Hong Kong, manages about $28.6 billion in assets.
The SK Hynix ETF offers amplified exposure to one of Asia’s hottest semiconductor names at a time when Korean rules ban single-stock leveraged and inverse ETFs, driving investors to seek such products overseas.
SK Hynix, which commanded a 36% share of the global DRAM market in the second quarter of this year, has expanded into NAND flash memory through an $8.8 billion acquisition of Intel Corp.’s NAND unit and has earmarked 23.4 trillion won ($16.5 billion) in capital spending this year to expand capacity for HBM chips.
Its shares jumped 7.1% to end at 452,500 won in Seoul trading on Thursday.
By Su-Ji Na
suji@hankyung.com
Sookyung Seo edited this article.
