July 7 Member Morning News: The largest foreign company in history is about to be priced for listing in the US; Microsoft lays off 4,800 people.

【The Largest Foreign IPO in the U.S. Is About to Be Priced】SK Hynix, the world's second-largest memory chip maker and leader in the HBM market, will list its American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on July 10 under the ticker SKHY. It plans to issue up to 17.79 million new shares, raising up to approximately ₩45.45 trillion (about $29 billion). If priced at the top of the range, it would be the largest U.S. stock offering by a foreign company, surpassing Alibaba's 2014 New York listing and Saudi Aramco's 2019 IPO, ranking among the top five global offerings in history. The company began a roadshow and bookbuilding for overseas institutional investors across the U.S., Europe, and Asia on July 6, with the final price to be set within this week.

【Microsoft Lays Off 4,800 Employees】Microsoft announced on July 6 that it will cut approximately 4,800 positions, representing about 2.1% of its global workforce. Amy Coleman, Microsoft's Chief People Officer, said the adjustment is focused on the commercial business and Xbox divisions, aiming to redirect personnel, investment, and management attention to areas the company considers more critical for growth. She emphasized that the laid-off positions "are not being directly replaced by AI," but acknowledged that AI is changing how work gets done, and some routine tasks can already be automated.

【Strategy Conducts Largest-Ever Bitcoin Sale to Pay Interest】U.S. listed company Strategy disclosed on July 6 that it sold 3,588 bitcoins between June 29 and July 5, netting approximately $216 million to pay for distributions related to its preferred stock and to replenish U.S. dollar reserves used for those distributions. The transactions were completed in two batches: 1,363 bitcoins sold from June 29 to 30 at an average price of about $59,256, and another 2,225 bitcoins from July 1 to 5 at an average price of about $60,773. After the sale, the company still holds 843,775 bitcoins, with a disclosed overall average purchase cost of approximately $75,476 per bitcoin, and U.S. dollar reserves of $2.55 billion.

【U.S. Services Sector Expansion Slows】The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) reported on Monday (July 6) that the ISM Services PMI for June 2026 came in at 54.0, down from 54.5 in May and slightly below the market expectation of 54.2. The index remains above the 50 threshold, marking the 24th consecutive month of expansion, indicating that the U.S. services sector is still growing but at a slower pace than in May.

【Gemini 3.5 Pro Allegedly to Be Released on July 17】On July 6, Geeky Gadgets, citing Universe of AI, reported that Google DeepMind has postponed the release of Gemini 3.5 Pro to July 17, 2026, because the team abandoned the original base model approach and shifted to more extensive pre-training to improve capabilities in mathematical reasoning, SVG scene generation, and image generation. It should be noted that July 17 is still a rumor; the official Google page currently only states "3.5 Pro coming soon" without confirming a specific date. According to leaks, Gemini 3.5 Pro shows significant improvements in front-end page generation, SVG vector graphics, visual code generation, and one-shot UI prototype generation, even surpassing Anthropic's Fable 5 in some anonymous tests and developer comparisons. However, it still lags behind Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 in repository-level software engineering, hardcore reasoning, and long-chain agent tasks.