On July 24 President Lee Jae-myung stood in San Francisco — after meetings with the CEOs of Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and Broadcom — and declared Korea…
Only about a dozen Korean companies trade as US ADRs — so most of Korea looks unbuyable from a US account. It isn’t.
For years a Korean buyback was only half a buyback — companies could resell the treasury shares later.
Korea’s defense primes — Hanwha Aerospace, Hyundai Rotem, KAI — carry a combined order backlog past ₩111.9tn (~$76B), yet none trades as a US ADR.
SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics are now over half of the EWY ETF — and 57–60% of the KOSPI itself.