CXMT Guided to 742% Revenue Growth and Its Shares Still Fell

ChangXin Memory Technologies, the Hefei company that is China's largest maker of DRAM, told the Shanghai Stock Exchange late on Friday 16 October 2026 that it expects revenue of 265bn to 270bn yuan for the first nine months of the year. That is between $39.61bn and $40.36bn, and it compares with 32.08bn yuan in the same period of 2025, a rise the South China Morning Post calculated at 742 per cent.

Net profit attributable to shareholders is estimated at 131bn to 132.5bn yuan, or roughly $19.6bn to $19.8bn, against a loss of 5.28bn yuan a year earlier. The filing attributes the swing to demand for AI computing power since the second half of 2025, which it says left the DRAM market short of supply and pushed prices up sharply. The numbers are a preliminary estimate and have not been audited.

The estimate went up and the share price went down

CXMT shares fell 6.5 per cent on Monday 19 October, CNBC reported. The immediate cause was not the filing but the week before it: Bloomberg reported that a closely watched semiconductor gauge had just posted its longest run of declines since 2008, and the iShares Semiconductor ETF fell 11.8 per cent over the week, its worst since March. Memory has been the loudest part of that trade in both directions.

Alongside the estimate, chairman Zhu Yiming proposed buying back 1bn to 2bn yuan of shares, about $150m at the top end, over 12 months, pending board or shareholder approval, to fund employee incentive plans or reduce registered capital. The buy-back is the tell. A company that has just estimated almost $20bn of nine-month profit does not need to signal confidence in its earnings; it is signalling about its share price, which the SCMP reported in August had made CXMT China's most valuable listed company shortly after its July flotation.

What the nine-month figure implies for July to September

CXMT reported first-half revenue of 150.3bn yuan and net profit of 77.6bn yuan on 28 August 2026, according to Reuters. Subtracting those from Friday's estimate implies a third quarter of roughly 115bn to 120bn yuan of revenue and about 53bn to 55bn yuan of attributable profit. The first half averaged about 75bn yuan of revenue a quarter, so the implied third quarter is more than half again as large as the two that preceded it.

What the filing does not say is how much of that came from selling more memory and how much from charging more for it. CXMT names price increases as a cause without quantifying them, so the underlying growth in shipped bits cannot be worked out from the disclosure. The same gap ran through Samsung's and TSMC's October reporting, as Parallax Nexus noted when the two published on the same day, and it is the single most important number for judging whether these margins survive the cycle.

Fourth place, closing

Counterpoint Research data cited by CNBC puts CXMT at 10 per cent of global DRAM revenue, double its share a year earlier, which leaves it fourth behind Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology. Its first-half results had already beaten its own pre-IPO guidance of 110bn to 120bn yuan of revenue by about a quarter, on the SCMP's calculation.

The honest reading is that this is a price-cycle document rather than a market-share document. State-backed capacity funded by $20bn of windfall profit is how memory booms usually end, because the supply that breaks the price is the supply the high prices paid for. CXMT has given no capacity guidance, and the audited figures are still to come.