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ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China's largest DRAM manufacturer, will list on the STAR Market of the Shanghai Stock Exchange on the 27th. As the "big listing" draws attention from individual investors, the debut of CXMT, which has grown into the world's No. 4 player, is expected to signal a new wave of listings by Chinese technology firms.
According to Bloomberg on the 25th, CXMT raised 66.6 billion yuan (about 14 trillion won) in its offering, including the overallotment option. This is the second-largest ever, following the 68.5 billion yuan raised by the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) on the Shanghai exchange in 2010, and the largest offering since the STAR Market launched. With an issue price of 8.66 yuan per share, the offering is expected to give CXMT a market capitalization of about 580 billion yuan (125 trillion won), ranking around 11th among A-shares.
Founder and Chairman Zhu Yiming (pictured), born in 1972, was a prodigy who entered the physics department of China's Tsinghua University at age 17. After one round of founding and listing a company, he established CXMT, which primarily produces DRAM, in 2016 together with the Hefei city government.
CXMT's listing results are expected to influence the listings of other Chinese technology firms, including NAND flash manufacturer Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) and artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek.
CXMT's listing recalls the rocket company SpaceX, which made a spectacular debut on the U.S. Nasdaq last month. Both companies drew unusually intense subscription fervor from individual investors. CXMT's retail subscription ratio reached 212-to-1, with individual investors submitting a total of 9.4 million subscription applications worth 7.07 trillion yuan. That is 10 times the retail subscription size during SpaceX's initial public offering (IPO).
A short-term surge immediately after listing is also expected. According to U.S. broadcaster CNBC, on the decentralized derivatives exchange Hyperliquid, perpetual futures linked to CXMT's share price traded around $6.35 per share (43 yuan) as of the 23rd. This product pre-reflects expectations for the pre-listed company's unlisted share price movements. Converted based on the futures price, CXMT's market cap soars to about 2.9 trillion yuan. That result surpasses the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the largest listed company on the Chinese mainland by market cap. China's Huaxi Securities analyzed that "considering CXMT is the first A-share-listed integrated memory semiconductor company, its target market cap based on this year's expected net profit is 5 trillion yuan."
According to Reuters, CXMT signed a supply contract worth more than $3 billion with Tencent last month and a five-year supply contract worth more than $7 billion with ByteDance this month.
There have also been cases where CXMT has commanded higher market prices than Samsung Electronics, the global DRAM leader. Reuters reported that CXMT recently sold DDR5 64GB (gigabyte) server memory modules at a higher price than Samsung Electronics ($1,240). However, the fact that its self-developed high-bandwidth memory (HBM) lags competitors by several years in performance remains a challenge CXMT must overcome.
