CXMT prices record Shanghai IPO, valuing Chinese memory chipmaker at about $85 billion

Experts say shortages are forcing companies to explore Chinese chip supplies, yet adoption is still likely to be selective and politically contested.

It was mainland China's second largest IPO after the $22.1 billion share offering of Agricultural Bank of China in Shanghai and Hong Kong in 2010.

The China-based memory firm ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) had a massive first day on the Shanghai stock exchange after its shares surged 466 percent, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal and CNBC. The stock market frenzy boosted CXMT's valuation to $484 billion, making it the most valuable Chinese company listed on the exchange. […]

Shares of ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) could more than double from Monday’s close as the Chinese chipmaker expands its global dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) market share to 18 per cent by 2028, according to Nomura, which set a price target of 116 yuan. The listing of CXMT, the country’s top maker of DRAM chips, sparked investor momentum as its shares surged 466 per cent to close at 49 yuan. It has become the most valuable company listed on the mainland Chinese market. Its market cap...

Forget SpaceX: This Chinese chip stock is going to the moon. ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, recently went public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s tech-focused STAR Market (a China-based equivalent to the Nasdaq exchange), and has quickly shot up the charts. On its initial day of trading, it shot up almost 466%, becoming the most valuable company on the exchange, and accrued a market capitalization of around $487 billion. Despite many people only now learning its name, CXMT was founded a decade ago, in 2016, and has grown from a startup into a budding global player in the microchip industry.  AI-driven demand for memory chips CXMT’s growth in the more immediate term is likely associated with the huge demand for chips and memory related to the proliferation of AI—and additionally, as China looks to create and foster more domestic chipmakers. That’s in part because the U.S. federal government has instituted export controls and rules concerning semiconductors and similar technology being sold or otherwise sent to China. Currently, large-scale AI data center infrastructure buildouts are fueling most of the demand, and with it, demand for dynamic random access memory chips (or “DRAM”) is up. Prices are likewise up, and that’s spilled over into the market, with investors gobbling up chipmaker stocks and sending some companies to valuations of more than $1 trillion. Committing to memory That includes American memory chip company Micron Technology (Nasdaq: MU). While its shares have been volatile recently, the stock is up more than 727% over the last 12 months. CXMT’s post-IPO rise puts it in the conversation, but it’s still much smaller than other large chipmakers, such as South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the latter of which went public in the United States earlier this month. CXMT’s prospectus states that the company holds approximately 8% of the global market share in the chipmaking space, with Samsung accounting for 36%, SK Hynix at 29%, and Micron at 24%. Notably, CXMT’s share has grown around 3% over the past year, so the company is making more than just waves in the stock markets.  Even so, the company’s huge surge in the markets doesn’t mean it’s in the same strata as those competitors, experts say. “It’s going to be a steep hill to climb for CXMT in the high-bandwidth memory market,” said Neil Shah, vice president of research for Counterpoint Research.