RaymondsIndex

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...

There is a moment in the life of many a good company when the income statement and the balance sheet start telling different stories. The business hums along — margins intact, brands strong, customers loyal — while the capital behind it slowly stops working. Last month gave us a clean example of that divergence, and an activist willing to name it. The case. Quad Asset Management, a long-term shareholder in Youngone Corporation — the Korean OEM behind outdoor labels including The North Face — published an open letter on June 30, 2026, asking the board to respond by July 31. Its central figure is the kind that reframes a company in a sentence: Youngone earns a 17.5% return on invested capital in the apparel operations it actually runs, but only 2.1% on its financial assets. As of end-2025 the company held ₩1.1 trillion in net cash (about 36% of market capitalization) and ₩1.5 trillion in non-operating assets including financial holdings and investment real estate (about 48%). Quad'...

Two stories from the past week describe the same structure in two languages. In Tokyo, on July 17, the Liberal Democratic Party's project team on corporate governance circulated draft proposals warning of suspected collusion between activist investors and private-equity buyers in take-private deals. The document flagged cases where activist shareholders were suspected of "securing unfair gains" by reinvesting part of their sale proceeds into acquisition vehicles set up by the PE buyer, and floated tighter rules on calling extraordinary meetings, on shareholder proposals, and — borrowing from Delaware — on appraisal-rights claims by investors who bought in after a deal was announced. The backdrop is a market that has become one of the busiest for activism outside the U.S.: Japanese private-equity deals jumped 47.8% last year to $42 billion, and this year features a bidding war between EQT, SoftBank's LY Corp and Bain Capital over Kakaku.com, plus Elliott's stake-...

In 2026, U.S. companies are on track to buy back a record amount of their own stock — close to $1 trillion across the S&P 500, according to S&P Global. On the surface, that looks like strength: firms returning cash to shareholders. But look at the arithmetic underneath. Index revenue grew roughly 8.8% this year, while earnings per share grew 14.2%. A large slice of that "earnings growth" — by most estimates two to four percentage points — didn't come from selling more goods or services. It came from dividing the same profit across fewer shares. That gap is the reason our Capital Efficiency Index (CEI) exists, and it's a good lens for understanding what the index actually measures. What CEI reads CEI is not a verdict on whether a company returned cash. Buybacks and dividends are neutral facts — a healthy firm with genuinely no better use for its capital and a firm hollowing itself out can post the exact same payout line. CEI is built to tell them apart. It weig...

Two data points arrived from opposite ends of the same pattern this month, and almost nobody put them side by side. The first is Korean. As of June 19, 2026, Samsung Electronics and SK hynix together accounted for 54.76% of total KOSPI market capitalization — ₩4,162 trillion combined. What makes this remarkable is not the number but the path. When the index first crossed 5,000, the pair was 36.31%. At 6,000, 38.47%. At 7,000, 44.51%. At 8,000, 48.79%. The two names passed 40% for the first time only in March, and 50% by late May. Along the way, SK hynix overtook Samsung Electronics for the top market-cap spot — a reversal roughly 25 years and 7 months in the making. The second is Japanese. Listed companies there announced ¥16.2 trillion of share buybacks in January–May 2026 alone, up 34% year on year and a record for the period, closing in on the whole of the prior year's total. Fiscal 2025 announcements reached ¥22.32 trillion. The engine is the unwinding of cross-shareholdings,...