"DAIMAO MISSED OUT ON UNDERWRITING SK HYNIX'S IPO IN THE US, INTENSE REACTION WITHIN THE INVESTMENT BANK"

Morgan Stanley was not selected as the sole lead underwriter for SK Hynix's American Depositary Receipt (ADR) listing, with a transaction size of approximately $26.5 billion, the largest foreign investment in the US. They would have earned around $130 million in commission fees based on a 0.5% underwriting fee. The final underwriting syndicate consisted of Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase. Morgan Stanley had previously secured projects such as SpaceX and Anthropic, and was once seen as a top underwriter for the OpenAI listing, so this rejection was seen as a blow to its reputation internally. Industry insiders generally believe that Morgan Stanley's rejection is related to its repeated release of bearish reports on the South Korean semiconductor industry, including the famous "storage winter" analysis. Many investment banking professionals, including former executives from Morgan Stanley, believe that more people within the Seoul office are starting to think that the previous bearish reports may have cost the company the SK Hynix deal, and thus in the future, more caution is needed when releasing related viewpoints.