Samsung Said to Lay Groundwork for US Listing

Korean tech giant Samsung is reportedly setting the stage to list in the U.S.

The company has begun exploring a potential offering of American depositary receipts, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (July 14), citing sources familiar with the matter.

Those sources said Samsung has held preliminary talks with banks, but hasn’t yet decided whether to proceed with the offering. The company will take the health of memory chip stocks into consideration as it decides, the sources added.

If Samsung proceeds with a listing in the U.S., its expansive business portfolio and ongoing labor disputes could make the deal tougher to structure, the sources said. A spokesperson for Samsung told Bloomberg the company isn’t considering issuing ADRs.

However, Bloomberg’s sources said Samsung has in the past reviewed offering ADRs and decided against it, but the successful listing of South Korea’s SK Hynix has revived the idea.

SK Hynix, one of Samsung’s memory chip rivals, raised $26.5 billion last week in the largest ever U.S. stock market listing by a foreign company.

Bloomberg characterizes that deal as a sign of investor demand for companies at the center of worldwide artificial intelligence (AI) buildout, muting worries about brittle AI valuations.

PYMNTS wrote earlier this year about Samsung’s “arrival in the trillion-dollar club,” saying that valuation “expands a roster that increasingly defines who controls the architecture of the modern global economy.”

The companies on that list appear to have little in common, the report added, ranging from Walmart to Eli Lilly to AI hyperscalers.

“But beneath the surface, these companies share something more specific,” PYMNTS wrote. “They are not merely large. They are not merely valuable. Their scale and value both stem from the same source: they occupy critical bottlenecks inside systems the rest of the economy cannot function without.”

Samsung, the report continued, is not simply a maker of consumer electronics. It is also one of the most crucial semiconductor manufacturers in the world, embedded deeply into the global supply chain for memory chips, displays and advanced hardware.

“In an AI economy constrained by compute capacity and chip availability, that position has become extraordinarily valuable,” the report said.