Shares of Chinese memory-chip maker CXMT closed 466% above their offer price in Shanghai on Monday, 27 July, making it the most valuable company listed on a mainland Chinese exchange after Asia’s largest initial public offering this year.

The stock ended at 49 yuan, compared with the initial public offer (IPO) price of 8.66 yuan. That valued CXMT at about 3.3 trillion yuan ($488 billion), ahead of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. The shares touched 55.03 yuan during the session, a gain of about 535%.

CXMT raised 57.92 billion yuan by selling about 6.69 billion shares. Proceeds could increase to 66.61 billion yuan if an over-allotment option is exercised in full.
The offer was mainland China’s second-largest IPO, behind Agricultural Bank of China’s dual Shanghai and Hong Kong listing in 2010, and the biggest mainland semiconductor share sale on record.

The small number of shares available for trading helped magnify the first-day move. Only 6.73% of CXMT’s enlarged share capital was freely tradable, while the rest was subject to lock-ups. Turnover reached 141.1 billion yuan, the first time an A-share company had crossed 100 billion yuan in daily trading, Reuters reported.

Investors were buying into two stories at once. One was a global shortage of memory chips caused by the expansion of AI data centers. The other was China’s effort to build a domestic semiconductor supply chain that is less exposed to US restrictions.

A decade built on public money

CXMT was established in Hefei, the capital of eastern China’s Anhui province, in 2016. Its first investor was a vehicle controlled by the local economic and technological development zone, which provided initial capital of 10 million yuan.

Hefei continued backing the company as it spent heavily on factories, equipment and research. Government-linked investors associated with the city held 36.8% before the IPO, according to a Reuters review of company filings. The stake was valued at 213 billion yuan at the offer price and considerably more after the first day’s trading.

CXMT’s prospectus says it has no controlling shareholder or ultimate controller. Its largest pre-IPO shareholder was Qinghui Jidian, an investment partnership with 21.67%.

Hefei government-owned Changxin Integration held 11.71%, while the second phase of China’s National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, known as the Big Fund, owned 8.73%.

An employee investment platform held 8.37%, and state-owned Anhui Investment Group had 7.91%.

The prospectus formally classified 36.29% of the company’s pre-IPO shares as state-owned. Reuters, using a broader measure that included additional government-linked vehicles, estimated total public-sector exposure at roughly half.

Private technology firms also bought in. Alibaba-controlled entities held a combined stake of nearly 5% before the offer. GigaDevice Semiconductor, the flash-memory chip designer founded by CXMT chairman Zhu Yiming, owned about 1.8%, while a Xiaomi-backed fund held a smaller interest.

Zhu founded GigaDevice in 2005 after studying and working in the US. He led the company as chief executive until 2018 and remains its chairman. He later served as CXMT’s chief executive from 2020 to 2023 and has chaired the company since 2021.

Company filings put Zhu’s indirect CXMT holding at about 2.66% before the IPO, worth nearly 14 billion yuan at the offer price. He has committed about 768 million of those shares to an employee incentive program to be distributed over the decade beginning three years after the listing.

From DDR4 to AI demand

CXMT makes dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, which provides temporary working memory for smartphones, personal computers, servers and other electronic devices. The market has long been controlled by Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology.

CXMT ranked fourth globally in 2025, with a market share of about 7.7%, according to its prospectus. The three larger producers still accounted for more than 90% of DRAM sales late last year.

The company has two 12-inch wafer plants in Hefei and one in Beijing. It sells DDR5 memory used in computers and servers, as well as LPDDR products designed for phones, tablets and other devices where power consumption matters.

Its prospectus traces a key technical step to September 2019, when the company introduced an 8-gigabit DDR4 chip that it said was designed and manufactured domestically. CXMT now says it has put four generations of its production technology into commercial use and is developing a fifth.

By the end of 2025, it held 6,972 patents in China and overseas, according to the filing.

CXMT also supplemented its own research with acquired intellectual property. In December 2019, Polaris Innovations granted the company licenses to DRAM patents originally developed by failed German memory-chip maker Qimonda. CXMT agreed separately to acquire additional patents from Polaris, though financial terms were not disclosed.

Years of investment produced substantial losses. CXMT recorded attributable losses of 16.34 billion yuan in 2023 and 7.15 billion yuan in 2024. It reported its first annual attributable profit in 2025, earning 1.88 billion yuan as revenue more than doubled to 61.8 billion yuan.

The turnaround accelerated this year as memory prices rose. First-quarter revenue increased 719% to 50.8 billion yuan. Net profit reached 33.01 billion yuan, of which 24.76 billion yuan was attributable to the parent company.

CXMT expects first-half revenue of 110 billion yuan to 120 billion yuan. It forecast net profit of 66 billion yuan to 75 billion yuan, including attributable profit of 50 billion yuan to 57 billion yuan, compared with a loss a year earlier.

Its prospectus identifies Alibaba Cloud, ByteDance, Tencent, Lenovo, Xiaomi, Transsion, Honor, Oppo and Vivo among its major customers.

CXMT signed a five-year supply agreement worth more than $7 billion with ByteDance in July, after reaching a multiyear server-memory deal worth more than 20 billion yuan with Tencent in June, Reuters reported. Neither contract has been publicly confirmed by the customers.

The technology gap remains

CXMT remains behind the global leaders in high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, the stacked memory used alongside advanced AI processors. Reuters reported that its HBM technology was about two generations behind its main foreign competitors.

The company is building an HBM packaging facility in Shanghai and has aimed to begin production by the end of 2026. It is also adding conventional DRAM capacity in Shanghai and Hefei, with plans that could more than double monthly wafer output.

Export controls complicate that expansion. CXMT relies on deep-ultraviolet lithography equipment and multiple patterning, while Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron can use more advanced extreme-ultraviolet machines. China has been unable to buy EUV systems from Dutch manufacturer ASML since 2019.

CXMT also faces growing scrutiny in Washington. The Pentagon’s June list of Chinese military companies identified the chipmaker as affiliated with China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and indirectly linked to state-owned asset authorities. CXMT has denied assisting the Chinese military.

A US interagency committee has approved adding CXMT to the Commerce Department’s Entity List, Reuters reported, but the decision has not been implemented. Such a listing would make it far harder for US companies to supply the chipmaker with equipment, software and technology.

The prospectus also warns that the current memory boom may not last. Slower AI investment, weaker prices or aggressive expansion by larger rivals could return the industry to oversupply.