CXMT Chipmaker Becomes China’s Most Valuable Listed Firm

CXMT is now the name every trader in Shanghai is repeating. On Monday, shares of ChangXin Memory Technologies surged more than 470 percent within hours of their debut on the STAR Market. As a result, the memory chip maker overtook Industrial and Commercial Bank of China to become the most valuable company listed anywhere on the Chinese mainland.

The stock opened at 49.50 yuan. That is nearly six times its IPO price of 8.66 yuan. So, that single jump pushed CXMT’s market capitalisation to roughly 3.3 trillion yuan, or about $487 billion. This figure dwarfed ICBC’s previous mainland record of around 2.56 trillion yuan. In fact, CXMT had priced its offering at just 579 billion yuan only days earlier, which is why the scale of the leap has left even seasoned analysts reaching for superlatives.

A Record-Breaking Listing

The offering itself was no small affair either. CXMT raised 57.92 billion yuan, close to $8.6 billion, making it Asia’s largest IPO so far this year. In fact, it edged past the 53.2 billion yuan that chip foundry SMIC collected back in 2020. Demand was so intense before the listing that offshore investors turned to crypto platforms for a workaround. Shut out of direct access, many used Hyperliquid to speculate on CXMT’s valuation through perpetual futures contracts instead. This says as much about pent-up appetite as it does about the stock itself.

Founded in 2016 by Chairman Zhu Yiming, CXMT is headquartered in Hefei, Anhui Province. The company builds dynamic random access memory chips, the kind that power everything from smartphones and laptops to the data centres now driving the global AI boom. Consequently, CXMT has said most of the IPO proceeds will go toward ramping up chip production and expanding research. This signals just how central memory manufacturing has become to Beijing’s semiconductor ambitions.

Riding the AI Memory Wave

Timing has clearly worked in CXMT’s favour too. The listing arrives amid a global memory shortage fuelled by AI data centre demand. Meanwhile, reports have surfaced that Apple has begun testing CXMT’s DRAM for devices sold in China. The company’s own numbers back up the momentum as well. For instance, CXMT swung to an operating profit of 35.43 billion yuan in the first quarter, a sharp turnaround from a 2.83 billion yuan loss the year before.

Still, CXMT remains a distant challenger overall. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron together control roughly 90 percent of global DRAM supply. Meanwhile, Washington has kept a wary eye on the Chinese chipmaker. Back in 2024, US officials weighed adding CXMT to the Commerce Department’s Entity List, part of a broader effort to slow China’s advance in chipmaking.

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Comfort for Beijing’s Regulators

This blockbuster debut lands at a useful moment for Chinese officials. They have spent recent weeks trying to steady a market slump that wiped out more than $1.5 trillion in value. Some feared CXMT’s massive offering would drain liquidity from other tech stocks. Because of this, the China Securities Regulatory Commission held meetings with fund managers, securities firms and academics ahead of the listing.

So, can CXMT hold onto its new crown? That question will likely define the next few months. Either way, Monday’s surge says plenty about how far China’s chip ambitions have travelled, and how much of it was genuine conviction versus scarcity-driven hype.