Hana Micron, South Korea’s largest outsourced assembly and test supplier, won a KRW 50B low-interest loan from the National Growth Fund late last month. The Korea Development Bank administers the fund. The company will add KRW 20B of its own to build a four-story test facility beside its Asan plant.
Building work on that site could get underway before December closes, with the company aiming to have it running by 2028. Once live, it would test on-device AI application processors, Samsung Electronics’ Exynos 2700 included.
The financing choice is the story. Bond yields have been volatile and bank lending had limits, so a state vehicle priced at government bond levels, repaid over seven years after a three-year grace period, won out. Chief financial officer Park Sang-mook said corporate bonds were unsuitable because pricing depends on issue timing and buyers prefer two-year paper.
The fund’s rationale is structural rather than financial. An official said support weighted the fact that Korea’s back-end chip ecosystem sits behind Taiwan’s, and framed the loan as a way to lift the domestic value chain.
Two of the largest chipmakers on earth, Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, send Hana Micron a good share of its work. As AI demand fills their front-end lines, the testing and packaging steps downstream become the constraint. Rows of equipment at Asan were already stripping wafer backs below the thickness of a human hair on a recent visit.
That the country’s largest packager needed a concessionary loan to expand says something about how the boom is financed. Demand is not the bottleneck. Capital cost is.
