HANMI Semiconductor and Chair Gwak Dong-shin said on the 7th that they earned a total of 479.5 billion won in revenue by investing in HPSP shares. HANMI Semiconductor plans to use the sale proceeds to strengthen its business competitiveness.
HANMI Semiconductor and Chair Gwak Dong-shin each invested 37.5 billion won, for a total of 75 billion won, in HPSP through a board resolution in June 2021. Through this, they held a total of 25% equity (HANMI Semiconductor 12.5%, Chair Gwak 12.5%) and rose to the position of HPSP's second-largest shareholder.
Chair Gwak Dong-shin's HPSP investment stemmed from his connection with Palantir founder Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, is known as the person who co-founded PayPal with Tesla CEO Elon Musk and as an early investor in Facebook, LinkedIn, and SpaceX.
Through Crescendo Equity Partners, a global private equity fund to which he contributed capital, he made the first-ever investment in HANMI Semiconductor by a Korean company in 2013, forming a connection with Chair Gwak, which later led to the joint investment in HPSP.
Founded in 2017, HPSP is a semiconductor annealing (Annealing) equipment company for high-pressure heat treatment essential to advanced semiconductor processes, and it has achieved remarkable growth since listing on KOSDAQ in 2022. HPSP's results, which were 91.8 billion won in sales and 45.2 billion won in operating profit in 2021, recorded 181.4 billion won in sales and 93.9 billion won in operating profit in 2024, achieving twofold growth in three years.
Investment cooperation between Chair Gwak Dong-shin and Peter Thiel expanded to an investment in "LINE NEXT." LINE NEXT is an affiliate of LY and a company leading NFT platform development and the global Web3 business.
Peter Thiel invested $140 million—the largest in Asia's Blockchain industry—in LINE NEXT through Crescendo Equity Partners in 2023, and Chair Gwak personally invested 31 billion won in 2024, securing 8.5% equity.