Elice Group shares fell about a third in their Tuesday KOSDAQ debut despite heavy demand for the South Korean AI infrastructure company’s offering, underscoring the gap between book-building and trading. Buyers who paid the offer price ended the session with a paper loss of roughly a third, based on the reported decline.
Elice set its offer price at 90,500 won per share on Oct. 6, the top of its proposed range. The company said institutional bids during book-building from Sept. 23 to Oct. 1 reached 388.8 times the shares available and that the offering totaled about 201.1 billion won.
The debut followed a rebound in U.S. technology shares on Monday, Oct. 19, when the Nasdaq composite rose 1.1% and the S&P 500 gained 0.4%. On Tuesday, Oct. 20, South Korea’s KOSPI fell 3.73% and the KOSDAQ dropped 3.33%. Reuters reported that U.S.-listed AI cloud companies CoreWeave and Nebius Group were each down more than 5% during Tuesday’s U.S. trading. Those declines came after Elice’s Seoul debut.
Reuters quoted Swissquote analyst Ipek Ozkardeskaya as saying chip-stock losses had bruised investor appetite for upcoming AI listings. “The timing is bad,” she said. Elice’s book-building had ended Oct. 1, before the later U.S. trading weakness described by Reuters.
Gartner’s Oct. 14 forecast said more than 80% of neocloud providers—cloud companies built for AI and other high-performance computing—would cease operating independently by 2030, citing cost pressure and limited differentiation. The forecast concerns the sector, not Elice specifically.
Elice said it plans to use the proceeds to expand regional AI infrastructure and facilities for graphics processing units, while pursuing overseas sales through operations in the United States, Singapore and Japan. The Associated Press identified Wednesday, Oct. 21, earnings from Meta Platforms and Lam Research as upcoming indicators of AI-related spending.
