RaymondsIndex

A clause that knew On 13 February 2026, Yuil Energy Tech (KOSDAQ: 340930), a battery-equipment maker, disclosed a control transfer. A financial investor group led by Kim Woo-gyeom, with five others, agreed to buy 19.1 million shares from the incumbent controlling shareholder at ₩785 apiece — ₩15.0 billion in total. The schedule was ordinary: a ₩1.1bn deposit on signing, then ₩2.2bn, ₩1.1bn and ₩1.1bn through 17 March, with 6.0 million shares moving as each tranche cleared. Clause 8 was not ordinary. It stated that if the company's external audit produced an adverse opinion or a disclaimer, the buyer's remaining obligations — a ₩6.6bn fourth instalment and a ₩2.9bn balance — would be waived, and so would the seller's obligation to deliver the remaining 13.1 million shares. On 31 March, the auditor issued a disclaimer: scope limitation plus going-concern uncertainty. Trading was suspended on 1 April. The company filed an...

This week gave us a clean picture of how markets discover risk the slow way . Korea's exchanges classified 284 listings as a potential risk group — 74 on KOSPI and 210 on KOSDAQ — as the KOSDAQ index sat below 1,000 points for more than a month. Alongside it: 137 KOSDAQ names trading under ₩1,000, and a rule change that pulls full-capital-erosion companies into delisting review from the August half-year reports. Roughly 50 KOSDAQ names are already at delisting risk on the market-cap threshold alone. Read that list carefully and you notice something: every criterion on it is backward-looking. A share price under ₩1,000. A market cap beneath the line. Negative shareholder equity. These are outcomes — the last visible symptoms of decisions that were made quarters earlier. By the time a company qualifies for the "risk group," the capital efficiency has already decayed, the raised cash has already gone idle, the reinvestment has already been skipped. A lagging screen is hones...

In the first half of 2026, Korean investors exercised ₩3.24 trillion of equity-linked bonds through the Korea Securities Depository — up 21.7% from the prior half, across 3,166 separate exercises (+10.7%). Buried in that total is a sharper signal: exchangeable-bond (EB) conversions alone surged 95.7%, from ₩0.83 trillion to ₩1.62 trillion in six months. That single line drove most of the increase. Convertible bonds (CB), exchangeable bonds (EB), and warrant bonds (BW) are the everyday financing tools of lower-rated companies — disproportionately KOSDAQ small-caps. The instrument is elegant and quiet: if the stock disappoints, the holder collects interest; if the stock rises, the holder converts and captures the gain. The asymmetry is structural. The bondholder — often the issuer’s insiders or the funds that underwrote the paper — decides when to convert, armed with the best possible read of the company. The retail investor who bought the stock during its run-up decides nothing. They s...

There is a particular kind of risk that never appears in a financial statement until it is too late to matter — not because anyone hid it, but because the rules never required it to be shown at the moment it became real. A recent KOSDAQ case reads like a controlled experiment in exactly that. The timeline. In February 2026, Vietnamese customs ordered the core production subsidiary of Seojin System — a KOSDAQ-listed manufacturer — to pay roughly ₩100 billion in back VAT. The subsidiary is not a peripheral entity; it is the group's main production base, and a liability of that size bears directly on the parent's liquidity, operations, and financing. Yet the item did not appear in the first-quarter report at the time. Reporting indicates the risk reached rights-offering investors before it reached the public filing, which was corrected only in June. When asked, Korea's exchange said a subsidiary's tax was not among the enumerated items requiring timely disclosure; the fi...

On 1 July, Korea's exchange switched on a tougher delisting regime. A KOSDAQ company whose market value stays under ₩20bn for 30 consecutive trading sessions goes on the watchlist; fail to hold the line for 45 sessions out of the next 90 and the delisting process begins. Kim Seong-cheon of the Korea Exchange told the KOSDAQ 30th-anniversary event on 2 July that roughly 50 companies are expected to become delisting candidates on the market-cap test alone, with the first designation likely in August. The threshold rises again in January, to ₩30bn. The reform is sensible, and the design detail is the interesting part: the exchange deliberately made it harder to leave the watchlist than to enter it. As Kim put it, the entry bar is similar to before, but the exit bar is much higher. That is an explicit attempt to stop distressed issuers from parking in purgatory for years. Still, notice what the trigger actually observes. Price. What the price knew last, and what the filings knew f...

Every equity raise comes wrapped in a growth story. New capacity, a strategic acquisition, deleveraging before an upcycle. The story is always about motion — capital going somewhere useful. But the most revealing question about a capital raise is not why a company says it needs the money. It is where the money actually lands once it arrives, and how quickly. Sometimes the honest answer is: nowhere. It sits in short-term deposits and money-market instruments, earning interest, waiting. Korea's market gave a clean illustration of this gap this month. According to filings compiled by regulators, 265 listed companies — 50 on the KOSPI and 215 on the KOSDAQ — announced rights offerings so far this year, up 44% from a year earlier. Yet the capital actually raised in the first five months fell 27.7%, to ₩1.81 trillion. More companies asking, less money arriving. The Financial Supervisory Service, which lifted its correction demands on offering filings by roughly 50% year over year, has b...