A record 57.9-billion-yuan STAR Market raise with a 6% day-one float by design — what sets the opening price is neither DRAM nor HBM but the listing venue itself. The premium expires in July 2027, when the lockups come off
The day-one price of China's DRAM champion IPO is a function of float scarcity, the A-share localization premium, and the memory supercycle narrative — not fundamentals. Roughly half of the 2-3 trillion yuan consensus is the price of the listing venue, not the price of the asset.
July 27 STAR Market listing confirmed — 8.66 yuan offer, 57.9B yuan raised (~66.6B with greenshoe), breaking SMIC's 2020 record. CXMT arrives with cycle-peak earnings: Q1 revenue up 719% and first-half profit guidance of 50-57 billion yuan.
Near term it does not impair the Korean big three's cycle logic — while CXMT absorbs commodity demand, the three accelerate their high-value mix shift. Non-US equipment and materials gain $5-6B of derived procurement demand. The pressure arrives after 2028 — a supplier outside the production-cut cartel holding 17% of global DRAM supply.
An opening below 2 trillion yuan (A-share fervor cooling) or above 3 trillion (overheating), whether the Hyperliquid pre-IPO perp premium holds or compresses (near $8.0 as of July 15, an implied cap of about 3.8 trillion yuan — above the consensus ceiling) along with its open-interest growth, and whether strategic-placement institutions publicly commit to holding in the months before the July 2027 lockup cliff.
ChangXin Memory, founded in 2016 in Hefei, Anhui province, is China's largest DRAM maker. It runs three 12-inch DRAM fabs across Hefei and Beijing and has extended its lineup through DDR5 and LPDDR5, ranking fourth globally in DRAM with roughly 8% revenue share. Founder and chairman Zhu Yiming also founded the NOR flash and MCU company GigaDevice. A Tsinghua graduate, he filled China's DRAM void through a joint venture with the Hefei municipal government.
A dramatic financial reversal is the backdrop to this . From 2016 to 2024 the company accumulated roughly 36.6 billion yuan of losses while ramping capacity, with long-term borrowings reaching 118.8 billion yuan. Then in the first quarter of 2026 it swung abruptly into the black: revenue of 50.8 billion yuan (up 719% year over year) and net profit attributable to shareholders of 24.76 billion yuan (up 1,688%). The company's guidance for the first half of 2026 is revenue of 110-120 billion yuan and attributable net profit of 50-57 billion yuan. That pace effectively erases eight years of accumulated losses with a single half-year of earnings.
Two forces overlapped to drive the reversal. First, the AI-driven memory supercycle. As the global top three concentrated capacity on HBM and server DRAM, a supply vacuum opened in commodity DRAM, and CXMT — centered on DDR4 and LPDDR — absorbed it, enjoying price and volume at once. Second, its own capacity reached economies of scale. Utilization climbed from 87% in 2023 to about 96% in 2025, and the workhorse node migrated to G4, roughly equivalent to the industry's 1z class.
Reservations about earnings quality must be stated. Current profits are leveraged to cycle-peak prices, and 99% of revenue comes from commodity DDR and LPDDR products. Overseas revenue is just 2.79% of the total; key customers are Chinese firms such as Alibaba Cloud, ByteDance, Xiaomi, and Honor. HBM contributes essentially no revenue yet. Its DDR5 parts are implemented by enlarging the die rather than shrinking the process, drawing criticism on cost and yield.
Governance is a textbook state-led capital structure: Hefei government investment platforms, the National IC Industry Investment (the "Big Fund"), bank-affiliated investment arms, and insurers form the skeleton. Chairman Zhu has pledged to sell none of his stake for ten years after listing, and for the following decade to dispose of at most 20% of the remainder per year. He also designed the largest personal-equity employee incentive in A-share history, distributing half of the 1.536 billion shares allotted to his partnership platform to employees over ten years.
CXMT is the case of an asset the state nurtured through eight years of losses arriving on the market timed precisely to the cycle peak. The 50-billion-yuan half-year profit is real, but more than half of it belongs to the cycle — that is where valuation must start.
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This report is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any financial instrument. Investment decisions should be made based on your own judgment and responsibility. The analysis and opinions contained herein are based on information available at the time of writing and are subject to change.
