China’s CXMT expects revenue surge as memory chip demand soars

Changxin Memory Technologies has emerged as one of the clearest winners of the AI memory squeeze, forecasting first-half revenue of 110 billion yuan to 120 billion yuan as global DRAM prices climb and demand outstrips supply. The Chinese memory chipmaker said net profit attributable to shareholders could reach as much as 57 billion yuan, a sharp reversal for a company that only recently was struggling to narrow heavy losses.

The turnaround is already visible in its first-quarter numbers. CXMT said revenue rose more than 700% from a year earlier to 50.8 billion yuan, while net profit reached 25 billion yuan, compared with a loss of 1.6 billion yuan in the same quarter last year. The company credited stronger output, higher sales and a better product mix, a sign that tighter market conditions are translating directly into pricing power for producers with enough capacity to ship.

The broader memory cycle has been especially favorable since the second half of 2025, when AI-driven computing demand pushed DRAM demand beyond supply and manufacturers adjusted production. That imbalance has lifted the share prices of major memory names and sent investor confidence surging. Samsung Electronics crossed the $1 trillion market-cap level in May, underscoring how quickly sentiment has shifted toward memory chips as AI infrastructure spending accelerates.

For China, CXMT’s rise carries strategic weight far beyond one company’s earnings. Founded with state backing in 2016, CXMT has become a central piece of Beijing’s push for semiconductor self-reliance, operating three 12-inch DRAM fabrication plants in Beijing and Hefei. Its planned 29.5 billion yuan listing on Shanghai’s Star Market, through the sale of 10.6 billion shares, is designed to fund production-line upgrades, technology development and research and development for advanced DRAM.

The company still has a long way to go to challenge the industry leaders. According to data cited in its prospectus, CXMT held about 4% of the global DRAM market in the second quarter of 2025, while Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron together controlled more than 90%. But the company’s ambitions are larger than its current share suggests. It is investing heavily in high-bandwidth memory, the specialized DRAM used in advanced processors for generative AI, and aims to begin production by the end of 2026 at an HBM back-end packaging facility in Shanghai.

CXMT’s chips already reach servers, mobile devices, personal computers and smart vehicles, with customers including Alibaba Cloud, ByteDance, Tencent Holdings, Lenovo, Xiaomi, Transsion, Honor, Oppo and Vivo. After years of losses of 8.32 billion yuan in 2022, 16.3 billion yuan in 2023 and 7.1 billion yuan in 2024, plus a 2.3 billion yuan loss in the first half of 2025, the company is now positioned to benefit from a tighter market that could reshape pricing, competition and geopolitics across the global chip industry.