China's CXMT soared 466% on its first day of trading after a record memory chip IPO

CXMT Corp. closed its first trading session on Monday up 466%, ending at 49 yuan against its IPO price of 8.66 yuan per share, after raising 57.

92 billion yuan ($8.6 billion) in the largest mainland Chinese semiconductor offering on record, according to Reuters. The debut lifted CXMT's market capitalization to 3.

3 trillion yuan ($488 billion), surpassing banking giant Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and making the Hefei-based chipmaker China's most valuable onshore-listed company. CXMT stock reached an intraday high of 55.03 yuan before pulling back to close at 49 yuan.

CXMT's Monday session generated roughly 141 billion yuan in trading volume on the Shanghai exchange, a level no A-share stock had previously reached in a single day. At the time of listing, just 6.73% of total shares were available for trading, with the remainder subject to lock-up restrictions.

The IPO surpasses SMIC's $7.5 billion Shanghai share sale in 2020. Retail demand was intense, with Bloomberg reporting the public tranche drawing 9.

4 million individual orders totaling 7.07 trillion yuan — a subscription rate 212 times the available allocation. CXMT, formerly known as ChangXin Memory Technologies, is the world's fourth-largest producer of dynamic random-access memory chips — components used in devices ranging from smartphones to AI servers.

The global DRAM market is dominated by Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology. Based on fourth-quarter 2025 sales figures, CXMT held a 7.67% share of the global DRAM market in 2025, the company said in its IPO prospectus.

CXMT guided for first-half revenue in the range of 110 billion to 120 billion yuan, more than seven times the prior-year figure, alongside net profit of 66 billion to 75 billion yuan, swinging from a loss a year ago. The company posted first-quarter operating profit of 35.43 billion yuan, a sharp reversal from the 2.

83 billion yuan operating loss it recorded in the same period a year prior, according to CNBC. Morningstar's Jing Jie Yu told Reuters the IPO was priced at about one times his firm's 2027 price-to-book estimate, a steep discount to the 2.1-to-2.

3-times range for international peers, yet he viewed the opening-day pop as overdone, citing the memory industry's boom-bust cycles and the enduring headwind of U.S. technology export restrictions.

Yuan Yuwei, who manages money at Trinity Synergy Investments, said the shares were overpriced and speculative, warning that "it's hard to say the optimism is sustainable." Micron, which CXMT now trails in market capitalization, raised its planned U.S.

investment to more than $250 billion through 2035 and posted record fiscal third-quarter revenue earlier this year as AI demand drove a surge in memory chip spending. CXMT's prospectus cited AI demand as the driver of the latest memory upswing but warned the market could weaken if AI investment slowed or rivals added too much supply. Join 500,000+ readers who start their day with Quartz.

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