tkalAI Capital Flows
IPO deep dive · Tier M Memory

CXMT IPO — The Record Debut and the Three-Year Gap Underneath It

China's DRAM champion priced at ¥8.66, opened at ¥49.50 and traded up as much as 531% intraday to a ~¥3.3T (~$489B) cap — the largest debut on record and, in a single session, China's most valuable listed company, on a float of just 6.73%. The financials are real and the cycle is with it. What the pop prices away is disclosed in CXMT's own prospectus: a cost-per-bit gap north of 30%, an HBM line about three years behind, and a US procurement designation that begins to bite this summer. The setup, the numbers, the gap, and how the memory complex reads it.
Published · Post-listing analysis · Shanghai STAR · ChangXin Memory (CXMT) · For analysts covering memory, semis, and AI infrastructure

The setup

Two months ago this newsletter ran the pre-IPO deep dive on ChangXin Memory — the state-backed maker that lost ¥31.8B over three years and then turned a ¥24.8B single quarter as the memory super-cycle broke in its favour. On the listing itself arrived, and it did not arrive quietly. CXMT priced its Shanghai STAR Market IPO at ¥8.66 per share, sold 6.688B shares to raise ¥57.92B (~$8.6B), opened the first trade at ¥49.50 (+472%) and touched roughly ¥54.65 (+531%) by the midday break, settling the debut up on the order of 466%. At the peak the market value reached about ¥3.3–3.66 trillion (~$489B) — enough, for a session, to make CXMT the most valuable A-share company in China, ahead of the banks and the liquor giants that normally hold that seat.

Two structural facts explain how a debut moves like that. First, the raise came in at nearly double the ¥29.5B the company had originally earmarked for its expansion program — the STAR Market's book-built pricing let CXMT bank ~¥28B more than the project plan called for. Second, and more important for the tape, only 6.73% of post-IPO share capital was freely tradable at listing, and the retail tranche was oversubscribed roughly 212 times. A thin float meeting national-champion demand is a mechanical recipe for a violent first print; the STAR Market has no first-day price limit, so the auction cleared where the marginal buyer was, not where a fundamental model would sit. The number to hold in mind is that the offer priced the company near ¥580B and the tape revalued it toward ¥3.3T before lunch.

The numbers

The financials the market is capitalizing are the ones the prospectus carried into the listing, and they are genuinely large. Q1 2026 revenue was ¥50.8B (≈$7.5B, +719% YoY) and net profit was ¥24.76B (≈$3.7B) — a single quarter larger than the entire ¥61.8B the company booked across all of 2025, and the clean inflection out of the ¥31.8B cumulative losses of 2022–2024. On the year-ago base this is one of the sharpest turnarounds in the industry, and it is real cash, not a mark: the super-cycle in DRAM pricing did most of the work, and CXMT was positioned to catch it.

Scale still puts CXMT fourth in DRAM. Its global bit-share sits near 8% as of Q1 2026, against Samsung at roughly 38%, SK hynix near 29% and Micron around 22% — so the revenue line reflects price at least as much as volume, and CXMT remains the challenger, not the incumbent, on units. Capacity is climbing fast toward the pack: the company runs on the order of 265,000 twelve-inch wafer starts per month today, targets roughly 350,000 by end-2026, and outside forecasts see ~500,000 by 2028 — which would be on the order of 17% of global DRAM capacity if the industry doesn't move. The prospectus is candid about the whipsaw that funds all of this: it flags DRAM average selling prices swinging 55% in 2024 and 34% in 2025 as a standing material risk. This is a company earning its way out of a deep capital hole at the exact moment the cycle turned — with the cycle written into both the upside and the risk factors.

Paid subscribers

The rest of this dive is for paid subscribers.

The headline numbers are above. The 7 sections below carry the mechanism, the peer read, the valuation work, and the dated tests that decide it.

  • What the debut is actually pricing
  • The three-year gap the prospectus discloses
  • How the memory complex reads this
  • Valuation reality check
  • What we'd watch from here
  • The read-through
  • Bottom line
Unlock the full dive →

Already a subscriber? Sign in.

Subscribe · free weekly

This is one print. The pipeline runs every week.

Every Monday, the single sharpest call from the pipeline — a dated, falsifiable read on credit, demand, and capex, then graded in public on the scorecard. Free.

One email to confirm. Unsubscribe any time.

Sources