Meet CXMT’s Zhu Yiming: the engineer building China’s answer to global memory-chip giants
From a Silicon Valley garage to China’s largest DRAM maker and a US$4.4 billion IPO, Zhu reportedly refused pay until CXMT became profitable
The Shanghai offering, set to start taking subscriptions on Thursday, aims to raise 29.5 billion yuan (US$4.4 billion). And some analysts predict that CXMT could eventually command a market value of 3 trillion yuan, placing it among China’s most valuable listed technology companies.
The listing will be a milestone for Zhu, who reportedly pledged in 2018 not to draw a salary from CXMT until the memory-chip project became profitable – which it did last year.
Yet Zhu’s wager on Chinese memory chips began long before CXMT. More than two decades ago, when he was a Silicon Valley engineer with a chip design but little money, Zhu predicted that the centre of the global memory industry would eventually shift towards mainland China.
In emails retained by Li Jun, one of his earliest investors, and later reproduced in a Tsinghua University alumni publication, Zhu observed that the industry had migrated from the US to Japan, and then to South Korea.
“It is time for China to play [a] role in this industry,” he wrote.