Semiconductor History | 향정동, Cheongju, 2 August 2022 — The Fab Hynix Sold in 2004 Came Back

One address in 향정동 has been the registered home of four different companies, and the buildings never moved. In October 2004 Hynix sold its entire non-memory business. The buyer was a company newly created by Citigroup Venture Capital Equity Partners, CVC Asia Pacific and Francisco Partners, and it was called MagnaChip. Five wafer fabs went with it, three in Cheongju and two in Gumi, along with the image-sensor, display-driver and foundry lines. A contemporary trade account put the consideration at about 954 billion won. What Hynix kept was memory. What it let go was everything else, while the company was still under creditor control and in no position to fund two businesses. MagnaChip grew into a leading supplier of display driver chips for OLED screens. It also filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2009, and by the end of the decade was selling the manufacturing off again. In 2020 it sold the Cheongju foundry business and Fab 4, which carried more than seventy percent of its wafer capacity, for around 510 billion won. The buyer was a fund run by Alchemist Capital Partners Korea, and the fab became a company called Key Foundry. Reports name the second private equity partner in that fund variously as Credian Partners and as Gravity Private Equity. The discrepancy runs through the English-language coverage and is not resolved here. SK hynix put 207.3 billion won into the fund. It did not buy the fab; it bought a seat beside whoever did. The rest followed. On 29 October 2021 SK hynix agreed to acquire the whole of Key Foundry for 575.8 billion won, and on 2 August 2022, with clearances from Korean and Chinese regulators in hand, it completed. Eighteen years after Hynix sold it, the eight-inch line was back under the company that had let it go. None of which is as tidy as it sounds. While SK hynix was buying this fab back, it was moving its other Cheongju eight-inch foundry, operated by SK hynix system ic, to Wuxi in China. One 200-millimetre line came home to 향정동 and another left, within the same few years, for a reason the company gave plainly at the time: proximity to customers. The photograph is a MagnaChip power transistor bolted to a heatsink inside a computer power supply — the sort of unglamorous part this site turned to once the memory business had gone next door. Nothing freely licensed shows the plant itself. Photo: Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons