Chinese chip billionaire Zhu Yiming adds $12B to wealth as CXMT becomes China’s largest listed company

The 54-year-old executive holds a small stake in CXMT, which is now China’s largest domestically listed company following its Monday listing, according to CNBC.

Zhu, who studied in the U.S. and is a permanent resident of Singapore, also owns shares in Shanghai-listed chipmaker GigaDevice, which he founded in 2004. Together, the holdings give him an estimated net worth of $15.9 billion, Forbes reported.

With a market capitalization of 3.7 trillion yuan ($546.4 billion), CXMT’s sharp rally was widely anticipated, according to Shen Meng, managing director of Beijing-based boutique investment bank Chanson&Co.

Investor enthusiasm has been fueled by the company’s status as a national champion in China’s escalating technology competition with the U.S. “Local demands will continue to benefit CXMT’s future development,” he said.

Theodore Shou, CEO at Yiyi Capital, said: “I have no doubt the company is going to grow to be a global leader. It’s maybe just a question of time that it can be not only a challenger, it can be a global champion in this particular sector.”

CXMT raised 57.9 billion yuan ($8.6 billion) in July by selling about 6.7 billion shares at 8.7 yuan apiece, before any over-allotment option, in Asia’s largest initial public offering so far this year. According to its prospectus, the proceeds will be used to expand production and fund research and development.

China has been fostering domestic technology champions to strengthen control over its semiconductor supply chain.

Founded in 2016, CXMT counts the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, also known as the Big Fund, the Hefei municipal government and Alibaba’s cloud computing unit among its largest shareholders.

Heavy research and development spending led to years of multibillion-dollar losses before the company posted its first annual profit last year as AI-related demand lifted memory chip sales.

CXMT supplies Chinese technology companies including Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent, as well as device makers ranging from Lenovo to Xiaomi.

“Unlike some of the mega IPOs that came before it, CXMT hasn’t reached the limits of either its technology or its market share,” Beijing Nuohua’s Zeng said, as quoted by Bloomberg. “There’s still enormous room for growth.”

After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from Tsinghua University, Zhu studied electronic engineering at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He later worked in Silicon Valley as an engineer at iPolicy Networks and as a project manager at Monolithic System Technologies.

According to a post by the Tsinghua Alumni Association, Zhu returned to China because he believed the country offered greater opportunities. The post said a key motivation was China’s reliance at the time on imports for more than 90% of its memory chips.

Zhu first founded GigaDevice, a maker of flash memory chips, before being selected to lead CXMT with support from the Hefei municipal government.