FirstFT: Chinese chip champion CXMT surges 466% in market debut

Good morning and welcome to FirstFT. In today’s newsletter:

• China’s chip champion soars in market debut
• India’s ‘cockroach’ protests inspire Modi’s critics
• How AI is changing book publishing

China’s chip champion soars in market debut

India’s ‘cockroach’ protests inspire Modi’s critics

How AI is changing book publishing

We begin with Chinese chipmaker CXMT, which briefly became China’s most valuable listed company yesterday in the mainland’s largest initial public offering since 2010.

What to know: CXMT shares surged 466 per cent on their trading debut in Shanghai yesterday. In a record-breaking day of frantic trading, investors raced to back CXMT, the world’s fourth-biggest maker of memory chips and hailed within China as evidence of the country’s success in forging its own AI supply chain.

Shares in the group closed at Rmb49, up from an IPO price of Rmb8.66. Its market value rose to as much as Rmb3.7tn ($547bn) during Monday trading, briefly eclipsing Hong Kong-listed Tencent as China’s most valuable company.

China’s chip champion: Based in Hefei, capital of the eastern province of Anhui, CXMT is the latest company to ride the AI boom as a build-out of data centres sends prices for memory chips soaring.

CXMT is China’s largest producer of DRam — the chips used in devices from servers to cameras — and ranks behind SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics and Micron.

In a sign of investor appetite, CXMT raised $8.5bn from selling 6.7bn shares, making it mainland China’s biggest IPO since Agricultural Bank of China in 2010. The company has an option to sell an additional 1bn shares.

“We knew it was going to be a big IPO,” said Tilly Zhang, a technology and industrial policy analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics in Beijing. “Still, it’s surprising how people have been so enthusiastic.” Read the full story.

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