By Liam Mo, Che Pan and Fanny Potkin BEIJING/SINGAPORE (Reuters) -Chinese memory chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) plans an initial public offer in Shanghai as soon as the first quarter of next year, eyeing a valuation of up to 300 billion yuan ($42.12 billion), two sources briefed on the matter said. Founded in 2016 with government backing, CXMT leads China’s strategic push to build a foothold in a global DRAM market long dominated by companies from Japan, South Korea and the United States. China's leading manufacturer of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) aims to raise between 20 billion and 40 billion yuan from the offering, the two sources said. A third source said it aimed to raise about 30 billion yuan and could unveil its prospectus to investors as early as November. The sources, who sought anonymity because the plan is not yet public, cautioned that IPO details such as timeline, offer size, and valuation, could change depending on market demand. The IPO plans come as China's semiconductor stocks have surged, with the benchmark CSI CN semiconductor index rallying about 49% year-to-date. The company's parent kicked off preparations in July known as the "counselling process" for an initial public offer and hired state-owned investment banks China International Capital Corporation and CSC Financial. However, that disclosure did not say where and when the company would go public. CXMT did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Two of the sources said they expected CXMT's IPO to attract strong demand from domestic investors looking to throw their bets behind China's quest for self-sufficiency. CXMT is investing heavily in catching up with market leaders such as South Korea's SK Hynix and Samsung, particularly on high bandwidth memory. This is a specialised type of DRAM crucial to developing advanced processors such as Nvidia's graphics processing units that can be used for generative AI work. PROGRESS IS CRUCIAL TO CHINA AFTER U.S. CURBS CXMT's progress has become more crucial to China after the U.S. curbed its access to HBM chips in December in a bid to hobble the country's AI progress. The timing of its offering comes amid significant shifts in the global memory market. U.S. memory maker Micron Technology plans to exit China's server chip business two years after Beijing banned its products from critical infrastructure, Reuters reported last week. The global rush to produce AI chips is tightening supply of memory chips used in smartphones, computers and servers, giving makers of such chips an unexpected boost. CXMT's capital expenditure, or capex, was estimated at about $6 billion to $7 billion in 2023 and 2024, with an increase of 5% expected in 2025, should the United States impose no further curbs, Canadian research firm TechInsights said. The firm is building an HBM back-end packaging fab in the commercial hub of Shanghai and aims to start production by the end of next year. Initial monthly output capacity of HBM wafers will be about 30,000, or slightly less than a fifth of South Korean's SK Hynix, said the third source, and a fourth, familiar with the matter. CXMT aims to start mass production of fourth-generation high bandwidth memory or HBM3 chips in 2026, two of the sources said. In September SK Hynix said it had completed its internal certification process for HBM4 chips and planned to complete preparations for mass production by the end of this year. "If it succeeds in the fourth quarter of 2026, they will use the G4 (16nm) generation for HBM3, which is still four years behind SK Hynix," said Choe Jeongdong, a senior analyst at TechInsights. ($1=7.1230 Chinese yuan renminbi) (Reporting by Liam Mo, Che Pan and Fanny Potkin; Editing by Brenda Goh and Clarence Fernandez)
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