China’s Answer to Micron Just Made Nearly $20 Billion

Omor Ibne Ehsan

Sat, October 17, 2026 at 1:48 PM EDT 5 min read

Quick Read

CXMT swung from a 5-billion-yuan loss to nearly $20 billion profit in nine months, giving China’s state-backed chipmaker cash to threaten Micron’s memory boom.
SanDisk dropped nearly 7% on the same day Micron fell 5.6%, reflecting its greater NAND exposure versus AI-driven DRAM that is lifting memory profits.
Micron’s Q4 alone earned $37.7 billion, which exceeded CXMT’s nine-month total, and its finance chief expects margins above any prior cycle peak.
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China’s largest memory chipmaker, ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), told the Shanghai Stock Exchange on October 16, 2026, that it earned between $19.6 billion and $19.8 billion in net profit from January through September 2026. That works out to 131 billion to 132.5 billion yuan. The figures are preliminary and unaudited, so they are the company’s estimates until audited results confirm them.

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In the same period of 2025, CXMT lost 5.3 billion yuan. Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) fell 5.63% to $878.84 that day. The whole chip sector sold off, so CXMT’s filing cannot be blamed for the drop on its own.

This creates a problem for Micron holders. CXMT’s profit shows the shortage is lifting every memory maker, but it also gives a state-backed rival the cash to build the new supply that usually ends memory booms.

What CXMT Put in Writing

Revenue came in between 265 billion and 270 billion yuan, compared with 32.1 billion yuan a year earlier. That is more than an eightfold increase. CXMT gave three reasons: AI demand has squeezed the DRAM market (the main working memory in computers and servers) since the second half of 2025, the company added capacity, and it got more chips out of each silicon wafer.

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Chairman Zhu Yiming proposed a buyback of 1 billion to 2 billion yuan over 12 months. So far, that is only a proposal, and no shares have been bought under it.