Key points
- ChangXin Memory Technologies closed its Shanghai debut Monday at 49 yuan, up 465.82% from an 8.66 yuan IPO price, after trading as high as 55.03 yuan during the session.
- That put its market value near 3.3 trillion yuan ($488B USD), past Industrial and Commercial Bank of China's 2.6 trillion yuan, making it the most valuable company on the mainland A-share market.
- Only 6.73% of the company's shares were tradable on day one. Turnover hit 141.1 billion yuan, the first time any A-share stock has traded above 100 billion yuan in a single session.
- CXMT guided first-half revenue to 110 billion to 120 billion yuan. It booked 61.8 billion yuan for all of 2025.
- Its DRAM output is reportedly sold out through the end of 2027, with Dell, HP, Lenovo and Apple already holding allocations.
- US memory names traded higher Monday morning. The same group fell 13% to 21% over two sessions on July 15 and 16.
On Monday, July 27, ChangXin Memory Technologies closed its first day of trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market at 49 yuan a share, up 465.82% from an IPO price of 8.66 yuan. The stock reached 55.03 yuan intraday, a gain near 536%. It trades under the code 688825.
At the close, CXMT was worth near 3.3 trillion yuan ($488B USD). That's past Industrial and Commercial Bank of China at 2.6 trillion yuan, which makes CXMT the most valuable company listed in mainland China. Against US chipmakers, it's worth more than Cisco (CSCO) and about level with Intel (INTC), which finished Friday near $453 billion and $489 billion.
The base deal raised 57.92 billion yuan ($8.6B USD), the largest listing in mainland China since Agricultural Bank of China in 2010, and the biggest IPO in Asia this year. A full overallotment takes it to 66.6 billion yuan. Chairman and chief executive Zhu Yiming called the listing a "new starting point" during the company's online roadshow, and pledged to speed up research and capacity upgrades. He won't transfer any of his own shares for ten years, and he's putting 768 million of his awarded shares into an employee incentive pool.
Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Associated Press that "CXMT plays a critical role in China's AI push, particularly in the face of US export controls."
Only 6.73% of the stock could be bought
Almost none of CXMT's share count was available Monday. Pre-IPO holders above 51% ownership are locked up for 36 months. Another 70% of the institutional allocation carries a six-month lock, with the first expiry on January 27, 2027. That left 6.73% of the enlarged share capital as free float. Turnover still came to 141.1 billion yuan, the first A-share stock ever to trade above 100 billion yuan in one session.
Jing Jie Yu of Morningstar told Reuters the "first-day surge was excessive," citing the memory industry's cyclical history and US export restrictions. Yuan Yuwei at Trinity Synergy Investments was blunter: "The (CXMT) stock is too expensive and smells of speculation."
The revenue guidance isn't a float story
CXMT was founded in 2016 and lost money for most of its life. It cleared a full-year profit for the first time in 2025, and barely. Here is what happened next.
| Period | Revenue | Net profit (attributable) |
|---|---|---|
| Full year 2025 | 61.8B yuan ($9.1B USD), up 156% | 1.88B yuan ($278M USD) |
| Q1 2026 | 50.8B yuan ($7.5B USD), up 719% | 24.76B yuan ($3.7B USD), up 1,688% |
| H1 2026 (guidance) | 110B to 120B yuan ($16.3B to $17.8B USD) | 50B to 57B yuan ($7.4B to $8.4B USD) |
Take the midpoint of that guidance and the second quarter alone brings in more revenue than CXMT made in all of 2025. A year earlier the company posted a 2.3 billion yuan loss over the same six months. Counting the minority stakes state funds hold in its fabs, total net profit for the half is guided at 66 billion to 75 billion yuan.
CXMT's prospectus discloses that its own unit prices swung more than 30% in both 2024 and 2025.
Its output is booked through the end of 2027
DigiTimes reported before the listing that CXMT's DRAM capacity is committed through the end of 2027. Dell (DELL), HP (HPQ), Lenovo and Apple (AAPL) have secured allocations after qualifying DDR5 modules built on CXMT's process, and smaller PC vendors got what those four didn't take. CXMT also signed a five-year server DRAM agreement with ByteDance worth more than $7 billion. Server DRAM went from 8.4% of its revenue in 2024 to 26.5% in 2025.
Capacity runs near 300,000 DRAM wafers a month now. The company targets 350,000 by the end of this year and 500,000 by 2028, with a new Shanghai fab starting production in 2027. Morningstar expects CXMT to reach 10% of the global DRAM market this year, and industry estimates put it near 15% by 2029. TrendForce had it at 7.6% in the first quarter, fourth behind Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix (SKHY) and Micron (MU). Those three hold 89.7% between them.
None of the IPO money is earmarked for HBM
CXMT named three projects in its listing documents totaling 29.5 billion yuan. Seventy percent of that goes to wafer lines and upgrades to existing DRAM processes. There's no dedicated high bandwidth memory project in the filing. HBM is the part of the market Nvidia (NVDA) buys from, and it's where the three leaders have been moving their wafers.
CXMT started mass-producing HBM in early 2026. Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research, said "a generational technical gap" still separates CXMT from the big three on HBM. Korean outlet The Investor reports CXMT's cost per bit on DDR5 runs more than 30% above the leaders, and its HBM3 8-high yield is near 25%. The money is going into conventional DDR5 and LPDDR5X instead.
TrendForce expects HBM to take near 30% of the big three's DRAM wafer input by the end of 2027, up from 22% this year, while producing only 13% of their bit output. HBM dies are larger and harder to build. In the third quarter the leaders are prioritizing server parts, which leaves less for consumer supply.
Export controls still cap how fast CXMT can grow
MS Hwang, research director for memory semiconductors at Counterpoint, told the Associated Press that "trade restrictions on tools are remaining as the key challenge for CXMT." Morningstar's Jing Jie Yu cited the same export restrictions when calling Monday's move excessive.
What the shortage costs a PC buyer right now
A 32GB DDR5-6000 kit cost near $80 in mid-2025. As of July 24 it runs $400 to $470, or $12 to $14 per gigabyte, per Tom's Hardware price tracking. Gartner estimates combined DRAM and SSD prices climb 130% by the end of 2026, lifting average PC prices 17% and cutting global PC shipments 10.4%. That would be the worst contraction in more than a decade. Dell, HP and Lenovo have each raised retail PC prices 15% to 20%.
TrendForce raised its third-quarter forecast for PC DRAM contract prices to 15% to 20%, from 8% to 13%, and sees server DRAM up 13% to 18%. Ellie Wang of TrendForce told Reuters the "memory market remains tight with price increases expected to continue through the end of 2027." SK Hynix chief executive Kwak Noh-jung put it this way on July 10: "Our customer demand continues to go up, while our capacity has limitations." He said demand will outrun his company's capacity past 2030. We covered the run of executive comments that came in the week before this listing, including Intel's CEO ranking memory as his biggest supply constraint and Elon Musk thanking Micron by name on a Tesla earnings call.
US memory stocks traded higher Monday morning
Micron, Sandisk (SNDK), Western Digital (WDC) and SK Hynix's US listing were all higher in pre-market trading Monday morning, hours after CXMT's Shanghai session had closed. Here's where the same four names have been this month.
| Stock | Jul 14 close | Jul 16 close | Two-day move | Jul 24 close |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Micron (MU) | $983.12 | $853.20 | -13.2% | $920.95 |
| Sandisk (SNDK) | $1,757.82 | $1,411.08 | -19.7% | $1,436.56 |
| Western Digital (WDC) | $563.32 | $466.81 | -17.1% | $519.80 |
| SK Hynix (SKHY) | $193.92 | $152.31 | -21.5% | $154.57 |
Coverage that week put part of the July 16 selloff on the coming CXMT listing and the competition it implies. Our read at the time was that Korea's share of AI memory was doing most of the work. Sandisk alone lost 29% in a week before Goldman published a target 60% above where it traded. Micron's consensus price target now sits at $1,548.86, with KeyBanc at $1,750 and Cantor Fitzgerald at $2,000.
SK Hynix reports Wednesday, July 29, and even the lowest analyst forecast on the sheet beats what the company earned in all of 2025.
Sources
- Reuters, July 27, 2026, for the debut close, intraday high, free float, turnover and market cap, plus the Morningstar, Trinity Synergy and TrendForce quotes
- Associated Press, July 27, 2026, for the Kyle Chan and MS Hwang quotes
- CXMT STAR Market prospectus and first-half 2026 pre-announcement, for revenue and profit guidance, the price-volatility disclosure and use of proceeds
- DigiTimes supply-chain reporting on CXMT's capacity bookings through 2027; The Investor for cost-per-bit and HBM yield detail
- TrendForce third-quarter DRAM contract price forecasts and 1Q26 share data; Tom's Hardware DDR5 retail price tracking; Gartner PC price and shipment estimates
None of this is investment advice. A 466% first day on a 6.73% float is what a small pool of buyers paid for a small pool of shares, and the first institutional lock-up on this stock doesn't expire until January 2027.
