SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won has agreed to sell 972,493 shares of SK Inc, the group’s holding company, equivalent to a 1.34 percent stake, to DFO Public Investments, L.P. for 544 billion won, about $406 million, a regulatory filing showed. DFO Public Investments is a Delaware-based fund affiliated with DFO Management, the family investment office of Dell Technologies founder Michael Dell, which traces its roots to MSD Capital.
The block is the unidentified remainder of a larger sale disclosed earlier this month. Chey agreed to sell 1.65 million shares, 2.26 percent of SK Inc, for 944 billion won in total to fund a divorce settlement with his former wife Roh Soh-yeong. Of that, 681,431 shares, 0.94 percent, go to Korea Investment and Securities for 400 billion won; the Dell-affiliated fund takes the rest. SK had described that buyer only as a strategic investor that had assessed SK Inc’s competitiveness and growth prospects.
The strategic logic is industrial as much as financial. Dell Technologies is a major supplier of AI servers and data centre infrastructure and does business with SK Hynix, the group’s memory chipmaker, at a moment when technology companies are competing to secure memory supply. The stake is held by Dell’s family fund, not by Dell Technologies itself, a distinction the filing coverage is careful to keep.
One governance question is already live in Seoul. The Korea Corporate Governance Forum has said Chey and the buyers would need to disclose their holdings as joint holdings if they had agreed, even informally, to vote together, and that failing to do so would breach capital markets law. No such agreement has been reported.