LG Group shares, which had surged on expectations surrounding the visit of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to Korea, fell sharply across the board on Wednesday. The decline appeared to stem from profit-taking following a short-term rally.
According to the Korea Exchange, LG Electronics closed at 304,000 won on Wednesday, down 88,500 won, or 22.55 percent, from the previous day, including after-market trading.
Other LG Group affiliates also weakened in tandem, including LG HelloVision (-13.56%), LG (-7.21%), LG CNS (-6.85%) and LG Innotek (-6.31%).
Although home appliances remain LG Electronics' core business, the company has been expanding its robotics operations, recently adding the "CLOiD" home robot to its "CLOi CarryBot" used in logistics. News that the company is developing its own physical AI model based on "Isaac GR00T," Nvidia's general-purpose humanoid reasoning model, also served as a positive factor that recently drove up the share price. LG Electronics, which traded at 91,400 won early this year, rose to 392,500 won as of the closing price on the 2nd, marking a 329 percent gain, but plunged on Wednesday as foreign selling concentrated on the stock.
Nevertheless, individual investors' expectations have not cooled. In June, individual investors net bought 2.2192 trillion won worth of LG Electronics, the second-largest amount after Samsung Electronics (5.5161 trillion won). In contrast, foreign investors net sold 1.8361 trillion won worth of LG Electronics, while also dumping large amounts of Naver (1.0265 trillion won) and LG Innotek (551.4 billion won), among others.
Meanwhile, Huang will visit Korea on the afternoon of the 5th. His visit comes about seven months after his last trip in late October last year. Huang is scheduled to meet with major Korean business leaders, including SK Group Chairman Tae-won Choi, LG Group Chairman Kwang-mo Koo and Naver Chairman Lee Hae-jin. The industry expects cooperation on high-bandwidth memory (HBM), AI data centers, autonomous driving, robotics and physical AI to be the main agenda items.
