CXMT Jumped 466% on Day One. The Company Has No Product Manager

On July 27, ChangXin Memory Technologies listed on the STAR Market under the ticker 688825. The issue price was 8.66 yuan. It opened at 49.5, touched a 535.45% gain intraday, and closed at 49 — up 465.82%. Market capitalisation passed 3.28 trillion yuan.

At the 8.66 issue price, the raise came to 57.919 billion yuan, beating SMIC to become the largest IPO in the history of the STAR Market. One winning lot of 500 shares was worth a little over 20,000 yuan on the day. Alibaba, as a shareholder, was sitting on more than 156.4 billion in paper gains.

Those numbers circulated all day. Here is the thing I want to talk about instead: the product this company makes is the kind that needs a product manager least of any in the industry.

First, the numbers

• Listing: July 27, 2026, STAR Market, ticker 688825. Issue price 8.66 yuan, P/E of 308.92.
• Day one: opened 49.5, peaked at +535.45%, closed +465.82%, market cap above 3.28 trillion.
• Raise: 29.5 billion planned; 57.919 billion actual at the issue price (pre-greenshoe), the largest ever on the STAR Market.
• Position: 7.67% of the global DRAM market — first in China, fourth worldwide.
• Product line: DDR4, DDR5, LPDDR4X, LPDDR5/5X all in volume production; the only Chinese manufacturer making DDR5 at scale.
• HBM: roughly 265,000 wafers/month total capacity, of which about 5,000 goes to HBM, targeting 30,000 by the end of 2026.

Then the financials, which are what this company actually looks like:

• 2023 non-GAAP net profit attributable to shareholders: −16.752 billion.
• 2024: −7.870 billion, on revenue of 24.178 billion.
• As of December 31, 2025, cumulative losses of 36.65 billion.
• 2025 revenue 61.799 billion (+127% year over year), net profit 1.875 billion — it only crossed into the black the year before listing.
• 2026 Q1: revenue 50.8 billion (+719%), net profit 24.762 billion.
• 2026 H1 guidance: revenue 110–120 billion, net profit 50–57 billion.

A company that lost more than 30 billion over three years made 24.7 billion in one quarter.

Where the 308.92x P/E comes from

The 308.92 multiple gets quoted constantly as proof the stock is absurdly expensive. It is really an arithmetic problem.

Divide the 579.2 billion issue-price market cap by the 1.875 billion of 2025 net profit and you get 308.9.

So the three-hundred multiple is computed against the loose change from its first profitable year. The same prospectus guides to 50–57 billion of profit in the first half of 2026. Annualise that and the multiple is single digits.

Both numbers are correct, and they are two orders of magnitude apart. Which tells you the market was never pricing earnings. It was pricing the cycle.

DRAM is an industry with no product managers

Back to the product.

DRAM is one of the most thoroughly standardised industrial goods on the planet. The spec is fixed by JEDEC, an industry standards body: DDR5 is DDR5 — pin definitions, timing parameters, voltage, package dimensions. Samsung’s, Hynix’s, Micron’s and CXMT’s parts must be interchangeable if built to spec. That is the entire point of it. You don’t think about who made the memory when you buy it.

Which means the people who make DRAM hold none of the things a product manager normally holds:

No authority over the spec. A committee defines it; you implement it. Think a parameter is badly designed? Doesn’t matter. The standard is the standard.

No room for user insight. The customers are PC makers, phone makers, server makers, and what they want is written on a purchase specification, word for word. There is no “what the user actually wants is…” here.

No taste to exercise. What a memory module looks like, how it feels — none of it moves units. It gets slotted into a motherboard and is never looked at again.

No feature roadmap. DDR6 is next; when it arrives and what it looks like is also up to the committee.

So what is left? Process node, yield, capacity, capital expenditure, and timing the cycle.

In the piece I wrote about Jensen Huang, he bet correctly that the GPU was a computing platform — that was a product judgment; he decided what the thing should be. In the piece on Wang Xingxing, Unitree’s real product is the price curve — also a product decision; he decided what the thing should cost. CXMT has neither. It does not set the spec, and it does not set the price.

Zhu Yiming, twenty years, not one product decision

Zhu Yiming is chairman of CXMT and the founder of GigaDevice. Go through his twenty years and the key decisions are these:

2005, founds GigaDevice to make NOR Flash. NOR Flash is a scrap-corner category in memory — small market, slow growth, not worth the majors’ attention. He chose it not because it was good but because it was the one crack he could survive in.

2016, founds CXMT and moves to DRAM. From the scrap corner into the staple crop. And where GigaDevice was fabless — design only, no fabs — CXMT went IDM: build your own plants, run your own wafers, do your own packaging and test. The heaviest, most capital-hungry, highest-failure-rate model in the industry.

July 2018, resigns as GigaDevice general manager to run CXMT full time as chairman and CEO, pledging to take no salary until the company was profitable. He honoured that for seven years.

Partners with the Hefei municipal government. A heavy-asset project that won’t pay back for a decade is hard for commercial capital to carry alone; a local industrial fund underwrote it.

September 2019, the first independently designed 8Gb DDR4 enters production — mainland China’s DRAM industry goes from zero to one.

Line those five up and not one of them is a product decision. Category selection, organisational form, funding structure, a commitment of time, an engineering grind — every one is a decision about how to stay alive, and none is a decision about what the thing should be.

So: does CXMT have a super product manager? No. That seat is empty in this industry. What sits in it is cycle judgment and capacity decisions.

What he designed was not a product, it was a structure

One thing does deserve to be pulled out, because it is the most design-like move in the twenty years.

Zhu Yiming holds two companies with opposite models.

GigaDevice is fabless — chip design only, no fabs, wafers farmed out to foundries. Light on assets: small outlay, quick to turn, healthy cash flow, but a low ceiling, because you are forever at the mercy of somebody else’s capacity. It took GigaDevice to the top tier domestically in NOR Flash and MCUs.

CXMT is IDM — design, manufacturing, packaging and test, all in house. The heaviest model in semiconductors: a DRAM line costs tens of billions to build, and once built you still have to climb the yield curve. Fail to climb it and it is pure loss. Payback is measured in decades.

In 2016, the same year GigaDevice went public, he used that newly proven light company as his credential to go after the heaviest project available.

Put side by side, the two cards form a complementary design-plus-manufacturing structure: low-risk cash flow and design capability on one side, high-risk capacity and self-sufficiency on the other. The first proved he could build a company. The second was what he actually wanted to build.

This move has more product instinct in it than any of the others — it decides not what a chip should be, but what organisational form to use to carry something that won’t pay back for ten years.

But note: it still isn’t a product decision. It’s an organisational one. Sometimes the most important judgment a product person makes isn’t about the product at all.

The product he actually built is endurance

If we must name a product Zhu Yiming built, I think it is this: he made “the company is still alive” into the product.

In an industry where somebody else defines the spec and a cycle defines the price, a company gets to decide exactly two things: how much to invest and when, and how long it can go without making money.

Look at the timeline.

Founded 2016. First DDR4 in 2019. Non-GAAP loss of 16.7 billion in 2023, another 7.8 billion in 2024, cumulative losses stacked to 36.65 billion. Seven years without salary. Then 2025 turns profitable on AI-driven memory price increases, Q1 2026 earns 24.7 billion, and on July 27 it lists at 3.28 trillion.

The turning point was not something he got right. It was that he was still on the field when the cycle arrived.

DRAM contract prices rose 93% to 98% quarter over quarter in Q1 2026. That increase did not come from CXMT’s product getting better. It came from AI vacuuming up the industry’s capacity: HBM’s share of wafer starts goes from 18% at the end of 2025 to 22% at the end of 2026, and possibly near 30% by the end of 2027. Capacity flows to the higher-margin HBM, supply of the ordinary DRAM that goes into PCs and phones gets squeezed, and prices go up. UBS expects the tightness to last at least into the first half of 2028.

Put differently: of that 24.7 billion quarter, how much CXMT earned and how much the cycle handed it is hard to separate. But one thing is certain: if the 16.7 billion loss in 2023 had killed it, today’s 3.28 trillion would have nothing to do with it.

That is what I mean by endurance as a product. It has a clear spec (survive to the turn), a clear cost (36.65 billion), a clear delivery date (seven years), and a real chance of failure. More than one Chinese memory project died on this road over the same period.

And endurance has to be paid for by somebody. A three-year hole of more than 30 billion is not filled out of revenue; it was held up by a particular funding structure — the Hefei municipal industrial fund underneath it, then round after round of state and industrial capital. Commercial money struggles to carry a project alone that won’t pay back for a decade and might get sanctioned to death along the way. There is not much money willing to sign that kind of long cheque.

So strictly speaking, “he could endure” is not entirely his own capability; it is the outcome of an arrangement. What he got right was accepting the price of that arrangement: seven years without pay, his entire personal return deferred to the end. Post-listing his net worth is estimated in the 90-billion range, with more than 6,000 employees holding stock alongside him. That number exists because he took nothing for the first seven years.

Both sides make it complete: he didn’t carry this through on individual heroism, but he was the one who tied himself to the ship.

So is this a great product manager

I set one entry criterion for my own list of the 100 product managers who changed the world: only people who created or invented a great commercial product, judged on product decisions, not on the person.

By that standard, Zhu Yiming probably doesn’t make the list.

He didn’t originate a category — DRAM isn’t his invention, DDR5 isn’t his definition. What he did was take a standardised good that somebody else had already defined, whose spec was already frozen and whose players had been fighting for thirty years, and build it in China from zero to fourth in the world.

The weight of that isn’t in the product, it’s in the industry. What it changed isn’t what a memory module should be, it’s whether China can make one. That is a national engineering achievement, and it is not the same category of thing as Jobs deciding the iPhone would have no keyboard, or Allen Zhang deciding WeChat would have no read receipts.

Praising both as though they were the same does neither any justice.

So I would put it this way: Zhu Yiming is not a super product manager. He is an engineer who bet twenty years on something certain to be hard and uncertain to work. That description is more accurate than “godfather of Chinese memory,” and it deserves more respect than that phrase does.

And some cold water

Cycles run both ways. Thirty years of memory-industry history is alternating booms and crashes. This one is driven by AI capital expenditure — stronger than previous cycles, and more dependent on a single variable. UBS says tightness lasts into the first half of 2028; that is a forecast, not a fact. The memory of losing 36.6 billion over three years is only eighteen months old.

Between 308.92x and a single-digit multiple sits one assumption: that 50–57 billion of first-half profit can be sustained. That is prospectus guidance, not a realised number.

7.67% share is fourth place, not joint first. The top three are ahead of CXMT on capacity, process node and HBM progress. CXMT’s HBM capacity is currently about 5,000 wafers a month, under 2% of its own total — and HBM is the most profitable part of this cycle. The target is 30,000 by year end, which is still the position of a company catching up.

A 465.82% first day says nothing about the company. It says the issue price was set low, the float was scarce, and sentiment was hot. None of those three has anything to do with CXMT’s yields.

Closing

On July 27, 2026, ChangXin Memory listed, rose 465.82% on the first day, reached 3.28 trillion in market cap, and raised 57.919 billion — the largest raise in STAR Market history.

The same company lost 16.752 billion (non-GAAP) in 2023 and 7.870 billion in 2024, carrying cumulative losses of 36.65 billion by the end of 2025; its chairman drew no salary for seven years; it earned 24.762 billion in Q1 2026, in a quarter when DRAM contract prices rose 93% to 98%; it holds 7.67% of the global market, in fourth place; its HBM capacity is under 2% of its own output.

The product it makes has its spec written by an international committee and its price set by a global cycle.