China chipmaker CXMT jumps 472% in debut after US$9.8 billion IPO

CXMT’s shares rose 472 per cent when they began trading in Shanghai on Monday (Jul 27), after the chipmaker raised as much as 66.6 billion yuan (US$9.8 billion) in the second-largest initial public offering in China’s history.

Formerly known as ChangXin Memory Technologies, the company sold 6.688 billion shares, before an overallotment option, at 8.66 yuan apiece via the IPO.

China’s home-grown champion is tapping into the voracious appetite for the memory chip story, a fulcrum of the global artificial intelligence buildout.

As the world’s fourth-largest maker of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM – the chips that underpin everything from smartphones to AI servers – CXMT has emerged as Beijing’s best hope of reducing dependence on foreign suppliers in areas including high-bandwidth memory, a critical component for AI data centres. 

Among onshore IPOs, the CXMT deal was surpassed only by Agricultural Bank of China’s US$10 billion share sale in 2010.

The sequence of sixes and eights – numbers traditionally associated with good fortune and prosperity in Chinese culture – is unlikely to be accidental, underscoring the significance of a listing that has become a symbol of the nation’s semiconductor ambitions. 

Hefei, Anhui-based CXMT is buttressed by retail investor demand, attractive valuations, and renewed signs of state-backed support for markets.

The retail portion of the IPO was 212 times oversubscribed, with individual investors submitting 9.4 million orders for 7.07 trillion yuan worth of shares – about 10 times the retail order book of SpaceX’s world record IPO. 

One reason behind the oversubscription rate is that regulators remain cautious about the valuations at which companies sell new shares to the public, requiring firms to have some comparison against peers in China and globally.

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Authorities have been known to discourage richly priced IPOs in an attempt to protect individual investors from losses.

When markets are buoyant, that can lead to companies getting smaller cash infusions than investors are willing to commit.

Similar circumstances produced some spectacular first-day performances as a wave of Chinese companies along the AI supply chain raised funds over the past year.

Semight Instruments soared a record 876 per cent in April, surpassing the 693 per cent mark set by MetaX Integrated Circuits Shanghai in December.

In a similarly watched debut, fellow chipmaker Moore Threads Technology jumped 425 per cent in December. 

Valuation may provide further appeal for CXMT shares, with investors growing increasingly cautious over AI-inflated multiples.

The IPO price implies 2.4 times book value. That is a 56 per cent discount to the average price-to-book ratio for global DRAM peers SK Hynix, Micron Technology and Nanya Technology, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

It represents an even steeper 77 per cent discount to the average for Chinese chipmakers Semiconductor Manufacturing International and Hua Hong Grace Semiconductor.  

To be sure, semiconductor shares have been volatile in recent weeks as some investors grew concerned that the mega-listing would signal a peak in the AI-driven rally. 

But many investors remain upbeat on CXMT’s long-term attractiveness, saying that buying forces may put a floor on the stock even if sentiment for chip names sours elsewhere. 

“Unlike some of the mega IPOs that came before it, CXMT hasn’t reached the limits of either its technology or its market share,” said Zeng Jiqing, a fund manager at Beijing Nuohua Investment Management. “There’s still enormous room for growth.”

A successful listing may also build momentum for other companies in the deal pipeline, including rival Yangtze Memory Technologies and Baidu’s chip unit Kunlunxin.

DeepSeek may file as soon as this year for an IPO, people familiar with the matter have said. 

Sell-side analysts are even more bullish, as they see the company at the intersection of the biggest investment themes of the times: AI and tech self reliance.

Huaxi Securities projects a market value of 5 trillion yuan at 40 times 2026 earnings, seeing revenue more than doubling to 572.7 billion yuan by 2028 from an estimated 277.7 billion yuan in 2026, with net profit climbing to 290 billion yuan. 

CXMT may be eligible for stock connect inclusion in time for the third quarter review in late August, taking effect in mid-September, at the earliest.

Global investors may not have immediate access to the stock upon its listing, though they are also watching the debut with interest. BLOOMBERG