Over to you, Credit Suisse. The consortium of banks itching to dispose of a controlling stake in South Korea’s Hynix, the world’s second-largest maker of computer memory chips, has given the Swiss lead managers until September to whip up some interest.

Good luck. Hynix was unloved from the outset. Seoul created it after the Asian crisis in 1999, ordering chaebols Hyundai and LG to find some way of mashing their rival chip businesses together. The tech slump then savaged the margins of the over-leveraged combine; lenders wiped out shareholders in a debt-for-equity swap in 2002. The banks have since taken advantage of periodic bursts of excitement over NAND flash chips – which sit inside every memory stick or MP3 player – to sell down their interest to 36 per cent. But they missed a good chance to exit entirely during last year’s surge; the stake is now worth less than a quarter of the $3.8bn of its value last June. Sales are expected to drop by about a fifth in 2008, leading to the first annual loss since 2003.