CXMT's shares jumped 466 per cent on their Shanghai trading debut, briefly making the memory-chip maker China's most valuable listed company as investors piled into the stock amid broad enthusiasm for artificial intelligence-linked equities. The Hefei-based group, the world's fourth-biggest maker of memory chips, closed its first session at Rmb49 a share, up from an initial public offering price of Rmb8.66, pushing its market value to as much as Rmb3.7tn ($547bn) and briefly overtaking Hong Kong-listed Tencent as China's most valuable company.
The listing raised $8.5bn from the sale of 6.7bn shares, making it mainland China's largest initial public offering since a bank listing in 2010, with CXMT holding an option to sell a further 1bn shares. The scale of demand pushed the company's price-to-earnings ratio above 1,600. Nomura addressed that valuation in a note initiating coverage of the stock, setting a target price of Rmb116 a share, an increase of more than 1,200 per cent from the IPO price.
CXMT ranks behind SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics and Micron in the global DRam market and is using the listing proceeds to expand production capacity and fund research and development. The company operates three DRam wafer plants across Beijing and Hefei and has said in its prospectus that it intends to keep expanding output and increasing its share of the global market. Research firm SemiAnalysis has estimated that CXMT's capacity could reach 350,000 wafer starts a month by the end of this year, approaching Micron's 385,000, and rise to 500,000 by the end of 2028.
That expansion sits within a much larger investment cycle driven by artificial intelligence, data centres, semiconductors and the power infrastructure required to support them. Finance Gazette has separately examined projections for as much as $31 trillion of AI infrastructure investment through 2050, providing broader context for the capital spending now being directed toward compute capacity and its supporting infrastructure.
The company returned to profit this year, reporting Rmb33bn ($4.9bn) in earnings in the first quarter alone, a reversal from cumulative losses of Rmb37bn built up over the preceding decade. Tilly Zhang, a technology and industrial policy analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, said the scale of investor demand had exceeded expectations even though the size of the IPO itself had been anticipated. She noted that CXMT's profits have come largely from lower-end chips used in household electronics, since the leading global producers remain focused on high-bandwidth memory chips for AI data centres. CXMT is also developing HBM chips but lags behind global rivals, in large part because US export controls have restricted its access to advanced manufacturing tools from ASML; according to Zhang, it is not yet manufacturing such chips at scale.
Some investors and analysts have cautioned that rising Chinese output could weigh on memory chip prices more broadly, posing a threat to established DRam makers such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. With three wafer plants already running and further expansion funded by Monday's listing, CXMT's coming reporting periods are likely to be measured against the capacity targets set out in its prospectus.
The declines come in the same week that capital has continued flowing into AI infrastructure elsewhere in the sector, with Nvidia's $5bn commitment to Safe Superintelligence underscoring how compute demand and chip supply remain closely linked even as investors reassess near-term valuations across the memory market.
