Semiconductor History | SK hynix Cheongju, 20 May 1999 — The Fab That Changed Owners by Consultant's Report

The Korean government did not buy this fab and did not seize it. It commissioned a report. In late 1998 the Federation of Korean Industries appointed Arthur D. Little to judge which of the country's two smaller memory makers should absorb the other. The finding, released that December, handed control to Hyundai Electronics. LG rejected it, threatened to sue the consultants, and said publicly that the evaluation had been slanted. Creditor banks then made their position plain to a chip company already carrying heavy debt, and the resistance ended. A memorandum of understanding followed on 20 April 1999. The definitive agreement came a month after that. On 20 May 1999 Hyundai Electronics agreed to buy 91,223,594 shares — 59 percent of LG Semicon's common stock — from LG Group companies and affiliates, for 2,560 billion won in cash consideration. The announcement said the combined company would have an estimated capacity of 620 million 64-megabit DRAM equivalent units for 1999. That press release still sits on SK hynix's own newsroom, which is a strange document to read today, because SK hynix is what the buyer eventually became. Accounts differ on when the two companies legally merged. Trade press of the period dates it to October 1999; SK hynix's own anniversary article puts the launch of the merged company at 14 October 2000. The agreement date does not move. LG's account of the episode is not neutral and has never pretended to be. The group records that it stopped attending Federation of Korean Industries meetings after 1999 and did not go back, despite the Federation's hall standing minutes from LG's own headquarters. The plant is still here and still making memory. This pin is Plant 1, the oldest fab on a campus that has been built out around it and is still under construction today. Four hundred metres away sits the analogue fab that Hynix sold in October 2004 to a consortium of financial investors, which named it MagnaChip. SK hynix helped buy that fab back sixteen years later, as a limited partner in the special purpose company that acquired it. The photograph is not of the plant. No freely licensed image of it exists. It shows a GoldStar-marked GD74LS15, a fourteen-pin logic package holding three AND gates, and the kind of object that outlives the company name printed on it. Photo: Drahtlos, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons