韩元因SK海力士ADR募资回流和出口商结汇预期走强

TOKYO -- The won has strengthened on foreign exchange markets as chipmaker SK Hynix's listing in the U.S. and South Korean efforts to encourage exporters to repatriate funds help tap the brakes on the currency's long-standing structural weakness.
The won has rallied to the 1,350 range to the dollar, its strongest level against the U.S. currency since July 2025, after softening to the range of 1,560 in June, its weakest since 2009. Against the yen, the South Korean currency is near its highest level since July 2024.
The immediate catalyst for the won's rally was the July 10 listing of SK Hynix's American depositary receipts on Nasdaq. The South Korean semiconductor giant raised about $26.5 billion from the offering.
"The government has begun focusing on bringing home corporate funds that previously were not being converted into won, rather than relying on costly market intervention," Nomura Securities foreign exchange analyst Guo Ying said.
South Korean authorities are believed to have conducted a won-buying intervention in late July, around the same time as Japan's yen-buying intervention, with the won outperforming the yen against the dollar.
SK Hynix has laid out plans to convert the dollar-denominated proceeds into won to finance domestic investments, including factory construction in South Korea. This large-scale dollar-selling and won-buying helped buoy the currency, triggering an apparent rush by other South Korean exporters to sell their own dollar deposits.
In July, the Ministry of Finance and Economy called on such major exporters as Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Hyundai Motor to increase the share of export proceeds they convert into won and repatriate funds held overseas.
The repatriation trend appears to be gaining momentum. South Korean companies had been net buyers of dollars in forward transactions for years, according to the central bank. But they have become net sellers since early 2026, indicating weakening demand for dollars in the forward market.
South Korea is seeing robust exports of semiconductors and memory chips, thanks to the artificial intelligence boom. The country's exports surged 68.7% on the year to $98.25 billion in August, according to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources.
"The won is also being supported by the narrative that strong exports are increasing demand for the currency among exporters," Mizuho Bank senior market economist Takahiro Hori said.
The Bank of Korea's hawkish stance on interest rates has provided additional support. The central bank decided at its Aug. 27 policy meeting to raise the benchmark interest rate by 0.25 percentage point to 3%, following a similar rate hike decision in July. The bank also upgraded forecasts for economic growth and core inflation in 2026 and 2027.
In Japan, the Ministry of Finance has disclosed conducting a total of 15.4 trillion yen ($98.8 billion) in yen-buying, dollar-selling coordinated U.S.-Japan interventions in the July-August period. This has led markets to increasingly factor in a faster pace of interest rate hikes by the Bank of Japan.
As of Thursday, the overnight indexed swap market, where traders price expectations for policy rates, was implying at least two additional 0.25-point rate hikes by March 2027.
But Japan's balance-of-payments data for the January-June half shows that reinvested earnings constituted more than 40% of the 15.91 trillion yen in outward direct investment. This indicates that Japanese companies are keeping profits generated from overseas acquisitions and factory investments within local subsidiaries rather than bringing the money back home.
Japanese policymakers previously discussed introducing tax incentives for companies that have repatriated overseas retained earnings and converted them into yen, but such measures were never implemented.
"There is less yen-buying demand than Japan's current-account surplus might suggest, because so much investment income remains overseas as reinvested earnings," said Atsushi Takeda, chief economist at the Itochu Research Institute.