A story about a Shenzhen couple who stockpiled chips in advance and saw their wealth surge by 32 billion yuan in just five months has recently sparked widespread discussion and trended online.
The husband, Li Hu, 51, co-founded Demingli, a Shenzhen-based memory module manufacturer, with his wife, Tian Hua. Li Hu personally holds a 35.01% stake in Demingli. From the beginning of the year to now, merely five months, his paper wealth has skyrocketed by over 32 billion yuan.
Li Hu previously worked in sales for eight years, primarily selling flash memory controller chips and storage products. His wife, Tian Hua, served as a marketing director at a Shenzhen IT company in her early career, giving her familiarity with product application scenarios.
When they first started their business, the memory chip sector had high technical barriers and was largely monopolized by international giants. They initially entered the field by acting as agents for overseas memory chips and selling flash memory modules. While accumulating cash flow and customer resources, they quietly researched controller chip technology, surviving in the gaps between the giants.
Through diligent effort, Demingli was listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2022. It promptly acquired the UD Store brand, quickly entering the embedded storage market.
Currently, Li Hu and his wife have capitalized on the AI wave, providing products like solid-state drives and memory modules for servers and data centers. Their products are in high demand, with prices soaring continuously.
By the end of March, the company's inventory balance reached 12.19 billion yuan, a 72.7% increase from the end of the previous year, accounting for a high 66.3% of total assets. In the first quarter of 2025, the inventory balance was 4.3951 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 177.4%.
Reportedly, from January to March this year, Demingli earned a staggering 3.346 billion yuan, more than double the total profits of the past ten years combined. In the same period last year, the company was still struggling with losses.
In April this year, Li Hu led a team to meet with over 30 investment institutions, detailing the reasons for the performance growth—high prosperity in the storage industry, and the team's early preparation with "forward-looking layouts in enterprise-level, embedded, and domestic substitution directions."
On May 11, Demingli Chairman Li Hu led an earnings conference. That day, Demingli's stock price rose approximately 7%, coming within a step of a 150 billion yuan market capitalization.
Recently, the memory chip sector, one of the strongest core themes in global stock markets, continues its strong performance. Memory chips are semiconductor devices used for data storage, widely applied in electronic equipment like computers, mobile phones, and servers. In the era of the digital economy, memory chips are considered the "second pole" of semiconductors, the "foundation" of the digital economy, and the "core bottleneck" of the AI era.
Influenced by the surge in demand for AI servers, memory prices continue to rise. Citigroup forecasts that by 2026, the average selling price of DRAM will increase by 88%, and the average selling price of NAND flash will rise by 74%.
The latest survey from third-party research firm TrendForce indicates that in the second quarter of 2026, contract prices for general-purpose DRAM are expected to increase by 58% to 63% quarter-over-quarter, while NAND flash contract prices are projected to rise by 70% to 75% quarter-over-quarter.
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