China’s DRAM giant CXMT plans US$4.2 billion IPO on Shanghai’s Star Market

CXMT Corporation, parent of Chinese memory chip giant ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), aims to raise 29.5 billion yuan (US$4.2 billion) from an initial public offering in Shanghai to fund technology upgrades, as Beijing presses ahead with its drive for tech self-reliance amid geopolitical tensions.

The Shanghai Stock Exchange received CXMT’s application for a listing on the Nasdaq-style Star Market, a filing on the bourse’s website showed on Tuesday night. This marks a critical step towards a listing for China’s largest dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) designer and manufacturer.

The company planned to issue no more than 10.62 billion new shares, the filing said.

In terms of fundraising scale, CXMT’s IPO is set to become the second-largest on the Star Market since its launch in 2019, trailing only the 53.2 billion yuan raised by chip foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation’s listing in 2020.

CXMT’s listing is also notable as the first “pre-review” project to be accepted on the Star Market. On the same day its prospectus was received, the bourse disclosed two rounds of pre-review inquiries and responses conducted in November.

The pre-review mechanism, introduced by the China Securities Regulatory Commission in June, is similar to a confidential submission. It is designed to protect information and technology security for companies engaged in critical core technologies, while avoiding premature disclosure of sensitive details that could lead to operational and competitive risks.

Founded in 2016, CXMT is an integrated memory manufacturer specialising in the design, research and development, production, and sales of DRAM chips. Its products are widely used in servers, mobile devices, personal computers and smart vehicles, with major clients including Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing unit Alibaba Cloud, ByteDance, Tencent Holdings, Lenovo, Xiaomi, Transsion, Honor, Oppo and Vivo. Alibaba owns the Post.

CXMT was China’s largest and the world’s fourth-largest DRAM manufacturer, based on 2024 production capacity and shipment volume, according to data from Omdia. In the second quarter of 2025, CXMT’s global market share increased to 3.97 per cent.

However, CXMT lagged far behind the world’s top three memory chip giants – South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and the US’ Micron Technology – which together controlled over 90 per cent of the global market.

CXMT planned to allocate 13 billion yuan of the IPO proceeds to phase II wafer fabrication and 7.5 billion yuan to the technical upgrade and transformation of the memory wafer fabrication mass production line, according to its prospectus. The remaining 9 billion yuan would be used for next-generation DRAM forward-looking technology research and development.

CXMT’s revenue for the first nine months of 2025 surged 97.8 per cent to 32 billion yuan from a year earlier. The firm expected a full-year revenue of at least 55 billion yuan.

Although CXMT reported a net loss of 9 billion yuan in 2024, the company projected it would swing into a net profit of between 2 billion yuan and 3.5 billion yuan in 2025, benefiting from the recovery of the DRAM market.

Also on Wednesday, GigaDevice Semiconductor, whose founder and chairman Zhu Yiming has been chairman of CXMT since 2021, kicked off its new share sale in Hong Kong.

The Shanghai-listed chip foundry aims to raise HK$4.68 billion by issuing over 28.9 million shares at up to HK$162 apiece. The stock is slated to debut on January 13.

The offer price represents a 32 per cent discount to GigaDevice’s closing price of 214.25 yuan in Shanghai on Wednesday.

GigaDevice had a market capitalisation of 152.2 billion yuan as of Wednesday, after gaining 108 per cent this year. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST