Another Big Korean Tech Company Is Buying Back Shares

Samsung on Friday announced a 2026 share repurchase plan valued at up to about $80 billion. While Samsung doesn’t have U.S.-listed shares like SK Hynix, it is a big holding of a popular exchange-traded fund, the Roundhill Memory ETF.

For the second time this week, a major South Korean technology company has announced a massive stock buyback plan. Samsung Electronics on Friday said its board approved a 2026 share repurchase plan valued at roughly 90 trillion won ($64.95 billion) to 110 trillion won ($79.38 billion)—about five times larger than its previous record and the largest ever by a Korean firm.

On Wednesday, memory-chip rival SK Hynix said it planned to buy back 40 trillion South Korean won ($28.79 billion) worth of shares over the next three months.

While Samsung doesn’t have U.S.-listed shares like SK Hynix, it is a big holding of a popular exchange-traded fund, the Roundhill Memory ETF, which invests in companies focused on dynamic random access memory (DRAM), high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and NAND flash—what Roundhill calls “the bottleneck of the AI revolution.”

At more than 25.5%, Samsung is the largest holding of the ETF, followed closely by Micron Technology and SK Hynix.

Shares of Samsung rose nearly 4% in South Korean trading today and have soared 135% since the start of the year amid the AI boom.