CXMT becomes mainland China’s most valuable company

The stock price of ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) jumped nearly 500 percent on Monday after the semiconductor company began trading shares on Shanghai’s Star Market this week in a deal representing Asia’s largest for 2026.

The Hefei-based chip manufacturer, which includes Silicon Valley’s Apple as one of its key customers, raised 57.9 billion yuan (US$8.5 billion) during its initial public offering (IPO). Trading at a market value of 3.1 trillion yuan (US$460 billion), CXMT became mainland China’s most valuable company overnight after taking the top spot from Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, whose market value sits at 2.6 trillion yuan (US$387 billion).

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Supply constraints are driving up prices for dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips, benefiting the equity values of listed companies that produce them. With US tech groups pushing up demand by building massive data centres to support their artificial intelligence ambitions, brokerage house Jefferies estimates the major US hyperscalers will spend US$695 billion in cloud related capital expenditure this year and US$870 billion in 2027, possibly filling order books for manufactures like CXMT.

CXMT’s IPO: market implications

Backed by Chinese AI chipmakers, the Shanghai STAR Market has rallied 26 percent this year, outperforming Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index, which has suffered a 4 percent loss. This divergence is driven by the latter’s heavy presence of e-commerce groups, which are encountering an increasingly competitive market landscape and have been slower to monetise their AI investments, analysts say.

Despite CXMT’s impressive market debut, the IPO coincides with semiconductor stocks experiencing heavy profit taking. While dominant semiconductor players like Samsung Electronics are up more than 70 percent this year, they have lost a third of their value this month due to valuation concerns and worries that mega-IPOs, like CXMT’s, could exacerbate short-term liquidity drains.

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However, in light of the recent market correction, long-term demand for computing will continue to grow, notes Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at Jefferies, in a recent sector report. Amid the heavy investments, the equity strategist expects the declining cost of token production to prompt wider adoption of AI, replicating how heavy broadband investment supported the uptake of the internet in a phenomenon referred to as Jevons Paradox.  

While the proceeds from this offering will be used to expand capacity, the broader implication is that Chinese companies are becoming increasingly competitive in both the NAND flash and DRAM segments, Wood explains, adding that  investors should not underestimate China’s capacity to gain market share.

According to its IPO prospectus, CXMT controls about 7.7 percent of the global DRAM market.