SEOUL, June 24 (Reuters) - South Korea's SK Hynix said on Wednesday it plans to raise up to 45.45 trillion won ($29.43 billion) via the listing of American Depositary Receipts, as it seeks to expand its investor base and production capacity for chips used in artificial intelligence.
The amount could change after bookbuilding, the company said in a regulatory filing.
The world's second-largest memory chipmaker plans to issue 17.79 million new shares to back a listing of ADRs on the Nasdaq market on July
10, it said.
SK Hynix said the proceeds will be used to build a chip factory in the city of Yongin, an advanced packaging fab in Cheongju and purchase chipmaking equipment such as an Extreme Ultraviolet Scanner.
The company said 10 ADRs will be equivalent to one common share. BofA Securities, Citigroup Global Markets, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Securities are managing the offering, SK Hynix said.
If completed at the top end of the indicated price range, the deal would become the largest-ever ADR offering, surpassing the $21.8 billion raised by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba in its 2014 New York debut.
SK Hynix, a dominant supplier of high-bandwidth memory chips used in AI systems for customers such as Nvidia and Alphabet's Google, has emerged as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global AI boom, becoming South Korea's most valuable company on Monday, overtaking Samsung Electronics.
($1 = 1,544.1400 won)
(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin, Heekyong Yang and Joyce Lee, Editing by Ed Davies and Louise Heavens)
