China's YMTC aims to become the world's largest NAND maker by the end of 2027, report says — company plans to overtake Samsung and SK hynix

1966woodenghost August 28, 2026 2 0

Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC) told investors and stakeholders in recent IPO preparation meetings that it aims to become the world’s largest NAND flash producer by the end of 2027, overtaking Samsung and SK hynix, according to a Financial Times report. The Wuhan-based company filed last week to raise 33 billion yuan ($4.9 billion) on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR Market, with most of the proceeds earmarked for production line upgrades and R&D.

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HBM3E vs HBM4 — (Image credit: SK Hynix)

The target would require YMTC to nearly double its market share in 16 months. Counterpoint Research put the company at around 14% of global NAND shipments in the second quarter, level with Kioxia, against roughly 25% for market leader Samsung and 22% for SK hynix and its Solidigm subsidiary combined. Analysts currently rank YMTC third globally, and first in China, by both NAND revenue and shipment volume in the first quarter.

YMTC, which has been profitable only since 2024, reported first-quarter revenue of 47.04 billion yuan ($7 billion) and net profit of 33.38 billion yuan, more than double its net profit for all of 2025. Gross margin, which sat at 5.45% in 2023, reached 35.3% in 2025 and 76.77% in the first quarter of 2026, with fabs running at 98.02% capacity utilization. The cost to get there has been significant for YMTC, which has spent 96.39 billion yuan in capital outlays on long-term assets and 15.95 billion yuan in cumulative R&D spending over the reporting period, generating depreciation and amortization charges of 50.95 billion yuan that leave margins exposed if memory prices turn.

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YMTC plans to issue between 1.98 billion and 2.43 billion A-shares, representing 10% to 12% of its post-offering capital, in a deal sponsored by CITIC Securities and CSC Financial. Of the proceeds, 20.8 billion yuan is allocated to mass production line upgrades and 12.2 billion yuan to advanced R&D. This implies a post-listing valuation of 275 to 330 billion yuan, though the Financial Times reported that the company is expected to trade well above that once its shares debut, and that pricing will likely be set conservatively under regulatory guidance.

The listing follows the template set by ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China’s leading DRAM maker, which raised $8.6 billion in July in Asia’s largest IPO this year and surged 466% on its first day of trading. By mid-August, CXMT had overtaken Tencent to become the most valuable company listed in China, and both firms are expanding output with new fabs in Shanghai and Wuhan.

That expansion is what worries investors elsewhere in the sector. Joanna Yang, a portfolio manager at Ninety One, told the FT: “For global investors, one question is how these Chinese companies’ capacity expansion is going to impact the supply-demand dynamics for memory. This is a global product — it has global pricing.”

YMTC has been on the U.S. Commerce Department’s Entity List since December 2022, cut off from advanced American fab tools. Its filing to list as the world’s third-largest NAND supplier, with 76% gross margins, shows where U.S. export controls work and where they don’t.

The sanctions regime was built to choke access to leading-edge lithography, and it has done so effectively for logic. NAND competitiveness, however, runs through a different channel, with layer counts, stacking architecture, and hybrid bonding determining bit density, and none of them depend on EUV. YMTC’s fifth-generation NAND bonds two decks of 150 and 144 layers into a 294-layer device using its Xtacking architecture, and the company has been building production lines around homegrown Chinese tools to close off the remaining dependencies.

YMTC’s listing turns that position into a funding mechanism. Margins earned at the top of the memory cycle are already paying for domestic tool development, and the IPO adds a capital source that sits outside the reach of U.S. policy entirely: Shanghai’s equity market, where CXMT’s debut has already shown how much money is waiting for exactly this kind of company.