On June 12, 2026, the man who built Leeno Industrial (KOSDAQ:058470) sold 7 million shares of it at ₩104,500 each. Two and a half months later the stock closed at ₩66,800. Over the same stretch the company reported the best three months in its history. That gap is the whole argument about this stock right now, and it is not really an argument about semiconductors.
Chairman Lee Chae-yun's disposal came to 9.18% of shares outstanding and about ₩731.5bn (~$520m at roughly 1,400 won to the dollar, an approximate rate). His holding went from 34.66% to 25.48%. He had filed a trading plan on April 24 flagging a sale window of May 26 to June 24, and he closed the block roughly two weeks early. Korean press put the discount to the prior close at about 12%, and TheElec noted the company had denied a sale before it happened. Whatever you make of the sequencing, the fact pattern is on the DART record and the market has been chewing on it ever since.
Leeno makes the consumable parts that sit between a finished chip and the machine that tests it: pogo-type test sockets and the spring-loaded Leeno Pin contacts inside them. Every new chip design needs new sockets, and the sockets wear out. It is a razor-blade position in the back end of the supply chain.
The second quarter of 2026 brought ₩143.2bn of revenue against ₩112.5bn a year earlier, up 27%. Operating income went from ₩53.4bn to ₩73.5bn, up 38%. Both are records in the eleven fiscal years of history on file. The operating margin came to 51.3%, the first time the company has cleared half in a quarter. Add the first quarter and the half year runs ₩243.0bn of revenue and ₩120.8bn of operating income, against ₩190.9bn and ₩88.4bn in the same half of 2025.
Full-year 2025 was already a step change: ₩372.5bn of revenue and ₩177.0bn of operating income, versus ₩278.2bn and ₩124.2bn in 2024. The prior revenue peak, back in 2022, was ₩322.4bn at a 42.4% operating margin. Leeno is now materially bigger than that peak and materially more profitable at the same time, which is unusual for a component maker in a cyclical industry.
One structural note that trips up people reading these figures for the first time. Leeno files no consolidated statements. It has no subsidiaries to consolidate, so everything above is separate, parent-only accounting straight from the DART filings. There is no consolidation gap to reconcile and no minority interest to strip out. The legal entity is the business.
A 9.18% block does not get absorbed in a week. It lands with whoever bought it at ₩104,500, and some of those buyers are event-driven rather than long-term. The subsequent DART record is consistent with a float that is still settling: large-shareholding reports from Samsung Asset Management on July 8, JP Morgan Securities on July 10 and again on July 29, and Mirae Asset on July 1 and August 3. Five filings from three institutions in five weeks is churn, not accumulation.
There is also the succession question underneath it. TheBell framed the April sale plan as a step away from passing the company to a second generation. That reading may or may not prove right, and the filings themselves do not say. What the filings do say is that the founder still holds a quarter of the company, which is a large enough position that the market will price in some probability of further sales until it has reason not to.
I would separate two things that get blurred here. A founder selling a quarter of his stake at a high price says something about his personal portfolio and his estate. It is weaker evidence about next year's socket demand than it feels like when the stock is falling. But the mechanical effect on the share register is real and it does not care about the fundamentals.
Trailing twelve-month figures through Q2 2026 come to ₩424.6bn of revenue, ₩209.4bn of operating income and ₩187.8bn of net income. Against 76,211,850 shares that is roughly ₩2,464 of earnings per share, and at ₩66,800 the multiple is about 27x. The market cap is ₩5.09tn (~$3.6bn).
Set that against the balance sheet. Total assets of ₩856.9bn sit against total liabilities of ₩80.1bn, so equity is ₩776.8bn and the equity ratio is nearly 91%. Cash of ₩86.8bn exceeds every liability the company has. Trailing return on equity on average equity for the period works out to the mid-20s in percent. Book value per share is roughly ₩10,190, so the stock is around 6.6x book, which is high in absolute terms and unremarkable for a business earning this kind of return without leverage.
The 52-week range is ₩45,250 to ₩127,000. The all-time high was ₩129,000 on April 23, 2026, weeks before the sale plan was filed. So the stock has given back roughly half from the peak while the earnings line went the other way. A 27x multiple on a business compounding operating income at this rate, with no debt, is the cheapest this company has looked relative to its own results in some time. That is a statement about the multiple, not a forecast of where it goes.
The obvious risk is that the record quarter is the cycle peak dressed up as a structural win. Test socket demand tracks new chip designs and test intensity, and both surge when a technology transition lands and go quiet between transitions. Leeno's own history shows it: revenue fell from ₩322.4bn in 2022 to ₩255.6bn in 2023, a 21% drop. Margins actually held that year, ticking up from 42.4% to 44.8% even as sales shrank, but the revenue swing was severe and the earnings line fell with it.
The margin itself is a risk. A 51.3% operating margin invites competition, and Korean rivals in the test socket space are not standing still. Leeno's moat is design turnaround on custom parts rather than a patent wall, and that kind of moat erodes quietly rather than all at once. If margins normalize back toward 40%, the earnings base that supports today's multiple shrinks by a fifth without revenue falling at all.
Then there is the receivables build. Trade receivables went from ₩52.9bn at the end of 2025 to ₩101.6bn at the end of June, roughly doubling, while half-year revenue rose 27%. Some of that is simple timing on a heavy June. It is worth watching whether it unwinds in the third quarter, because operating cash flow for the half was ₩68.5bn against ₩81.1bn a year earlier, lower despite much higher profits. Growing profits with shrinking cash conversion is the pattern that usually precedes a nasty quarter, even when it turns out to be nothing.
And the founder could sell again. Nothing in the record obliges him to, and nothing in it rules it out.
Three things, in order of when they arrive. First, the Q3 report due in November: whether the ₩143.2bn quarter holds, and whether trade receivables come back down toward the ₩50-70bn range they have run at. Second, any further large-shareholding or insider-transaction filing from Lee Chae-yun. His stake is public and any move gets filed within days, so the overhang question resolves on the DART record rather than on rumor. Third, the new plant. Leeno's own value-up disclosure of March 26 says the facility is due for completion in the second half of 2026 and that the capacity expansion is meant to fund shareholder returns. A completion notice, or the absence of one by year end, tells you whether 2027 capacity arrives on schedule.
The company held an IR event on August 21. Whatever was said there did not change the price much, which is its own small piece of information.
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