China's CXMT eyes $4.2 billion Shanghai listing to fund DRAM expansion

By Che Pan and Brenda Goh

BEIJING, Dec 31 (Reuters) - China's leading maker of DRAM chips, ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) Corp, said on Tuesday it plans to raise 29.5 billion yuan ($4.22 billion) through an initial public offering of 10.6 billion shares in Shanghai.

The company, which directly challenged South Korean and U.S. rivals by unveiling its latest DDR5 DRAM chips last month, will use the listing proceeds to upgrade production lines and technologies, it said in a prospectus on Tuesday.

Some will also be allocated towards research and development of advanced dynamic random access memory $(DRAM)$, it added.

Founded with state backing in 2016, CXMT spearheads China's efforts to gain a foothold in the global DRAM market, dominated by South Korea's Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and U.S.-based Micron Technology.

With investors such as Alibaba and Xiaomi after nine funding rounds, it has developed four generations of DRAM technology.

It runs three 12-inch DRAM fabrication plants in Beijing, the capital, and at its headquarters at Hefei in the eastern province of Anhui.

CXMT held a share of 4% of the global DRAM market in the second quarter, while Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung together controlled more than 90%, according to data from research firm Omdia cited in the prospectus.

The chipmaker is also investing heavily in high-bandwidth memory $(HBM)$, a specialised DRAM critical for advanced processors such as Nvidia's NVDA.O graphics processing units used in generative artificial intelligence applications.

It aims to begin production by end-2026 at an HBM back-end packaging facility it is building in the commercial hub of Shanghai.

The company expects revenue to surge as much as 140% year-on-year in 2025, driven by rising memory prices and higher sales volumes since July.

CXMT projects it could turn profitable as early as 2026 depending on wafer shipments and average prices, after losses of 8.32 billion yuan in 2022, 16.3 billion yuan in 2023, and 7.1 billion yuan in 2024.

It had a 2.3-billion-yuan loss in the first half of this year, the prospectus showed.

($1=6.9885 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Che Pan and Brenda Goh; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

((Che.Pan@thomsonreuters.com;))