KOSDAQ's New Delisting Rules: What Changed in July 2026

KOREASTOCKCHECK MAGAZINE · UPDATED AUGUST 2026

The Korea Exchange flagged 8 KOSDAQ companies as delisting risks in June 2026. In July, the month its new listing rules took effect, it flagged 32. In the first thirteen trading days of August, 69. The market didn't get three times worse over the summer. The new rulebook carries a built-in clock, and August is when the clock first ran out.

The new floors

The core change is the minimum market value a company needs to stay listed. For years the KOSDAQ floor sat at ₩4bn (about $3M), low enough that it almost never mattered. The new schedule, set by the Financial Services Commission and KRX:

So a KOSDAQ company worth ₩18bn (about $13M) was safely listed in June and on the delisting track in July, without its share price moving at all. Minimum revenue requirements are rising on a parallel schedule.

The penny-stock rule

This one is new outright. Since July 1, a stock that closes below ₩1,000 (~$0.71) for 30 straight sessions is designated an administrative issue (what that label means). It then has 90 sessions to trade at ₩1,000 (~$0.71) or better for 45 sessions in a row. Fall short and it's delisted. The same clock applies to the market-cap floor: 30 sessions to trigger, then 90 sessions to cure, with 45 consecutive sessions required. The "consecutive" part is deliberate. It stops a company from engineering a two-day price pop to reset the timer.

Why August exploded

Count the trading days. The new floors took effect July 1, and both triggers measure 30 consecutive sessions. Thirty trading days from July 1 lands in mid-August, which is precisely when the warning notices started arriving in bulk. The 69 companies flagged in early August are the first cohort to complete the new rule's observation window. Their 90-session cure clocks now run into the winter. That's when the delisting decisions come due.

How many companies get hit

In July the regulator revised its own estimate: about 150 KOSDAQ companies facing delisting in 2026, with a plausible range of 100 to 220. It had originally projected 50. The rest of the machinery sped up too. The maximum "improvement period" a company gets while under review was cut from eighteen months to twelve, and capital-impairment checks now run twice a year instead of once.

If you hold Korean small caps

The uncomfortable part for a foreign holder is that foreign brokers may not surface these Korean-language exchange notices in a consistent or timely way. The at-risk notices, the designations, the cure-clock outcomes: all of it is published in Korean, in the evening, on the regulator's filing system. A holder who reads those filings has months of warning before a delisting. A holder waiting for an English headline usually learns about the trading suspension after it happens (how the process unfolds from there).

Rule parameters per FSC and KRX announcements as of August 2026; schedules can change, so verify at fsc.go.kr and krx.co.kr. Designation counts measured from DART filings. Educational content, not investment advice.