ChangXin Memory Technologies, China’s largest maker of DRAM memory chips, expects to raise about 57.9 billion yuan ($8.55 billion) before any over-allotment option in its initial public offering on Shanghai’s STAR Market, the company said in a filing Tuesday. FinancialMediaGuide views the listing as a milestone for China’s push toward memory-chip self-sufficiency, arriving just as an AI-driven supply crunch has turned a chronically loss-making company into one of the most profitable IPO candidates in the country.
The company, known as CXMT, set its IPO price at 8.66 yuan per share and plans to issue roughly 6.69 billion shares, about 10% of its total share capital after listing. The offering is set to be the second-largest in the STAR Market’s history, trailing only the 53.2 billion yuan debut of chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation in 2020.
CXMT’s turnaround has been striking. The company posted a net loss as recently as the first quarter of 2025 but reported first-quarter 2026 net profit of 24.76 billion yuan, a surge of nearly 1,700% from a year earlier, according to its prospectus. FinancialMediaGuide notes that this kind of swing, from persistent losses to one of the sharpest profit jumps in the global chip sector, is what has allowed a company founded less than a decade ago to attempt one of China’s largest-ever technology listings.
The improvement traces directly to a global memory shortage. According to research firm TrendForce, DRAM contract prices jumped more than 75% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2025 and rose by as much as 98% in the first quarter of 2026, as Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology diverted manufacturing capacity toward higher-margin server memory and high-bandwidth memory for AI data centers. That shift opened room for CXMT to expand rapidly in the conventional consumer DRAM market it had traditionally struggled to compete in.
The company’s global market share has climbed accordingly: research firm Omdia put CXMT’s share of the global DRAM market at 7.67% in the fourth quarter of 2025, ranking it fourth worldwide and first in China, up from roughly 4% a year earlier. FinancialMediaGuide points out that a jump of that size in a market historically dominated by just three players marks one of the fastest share gains any DRAM maker has achieved in over a decade.
CXMT remains heavily reliant on its home market, with sales outside mainland China and Hong Kong accounting for only a small fraction of revenue, and its major disclosed customers are mostly Chinese technology firms, including Alibaba Cloud and ByteDance. The company has also begun testing chips with additional device makers as it seeks to broaden its customer base beyond China, though it still lags Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron significantly in the high-bandwidth memory segment increasingly central to AI infrastructure.
Proceeds from the offering are earmarked for capacity expansion, DRAM technology upgrades and next-generation research and development, positioning CXMT to keep growing capacity even as the current memory supercycle eventually turns. Financial Media Guide concludes that CXMT’s listing will be closely watched as a test of whether investors are willing to pay public-market multiples for a business whose fortunes remain tightly bound to a cyclical, historically volatile memory market.
