Bain Capital has fully exited Kioxia, the Japanese memory maker that emerged from Toshiba’s former storage business.
According to the article, Bain had completely sold out of Kioxia by July this year, with total proceeds estimated at $17 billion, or about RMB 115.1 billion. A Bain managing partner said, "An opportunity like Kioxia is exceptionally rare, and it is an outstanding outcome for all parties involved." Market participants cited in the article saw the scale of the transaction as a sign that institutional demand on the buy side remained strong.
Kioxia is a major NAND flash producer. The article contrasts that with CXMT, which is focused on DRAM, and notes that Yangtze Memory Technologies is one of the key Chinese companies advancing in the NAND segment.
The piece also points to a sharp reversal in listed memory names. Overseas storage companies had fallen 30% to more than 50% from their June highs, while CXMT had climbed to a market value above RMB 3 trillion after its listing. The split between cooling prices and investor enthusiasm has kept attention on the future shape of the AI-era memory industry.
Bain stepped in after Toshiba was forced to sell
The story goes back to 2016, when Toshiba was under severe pressure. The Japanese industrial group was hit by large losses at Westinghouse Electric and a financial accounting scandal, leaving it insolvent and facing the risk of delisting.
To plug the hole, Toshiba moved to sell assets. Its storage unit was placed on the block even though, in fiscal 2017, Toshiba Memory posted operating profit of JPY 500 billion and stood as one of the company’s most profitable businesses. The article says many people believed Toshiba could have bought itself more time without selling the asset, but the company’s internal decision-making culture and the storage business’s heavy capital needs pushed it toward a sale.
Interest was broad. Through 2017, at least 10 companies were said to have taken part in the bidding process, including Micron, SK hynix, Western Digital, Broadcom, Silver Lake, Amazon, Google, Apple and Hon Hai.
In the end, a Bain-led consortium that included SK hynix, Apple, Dell and Seagate acquired about 55% of Toshiba Memory in 2018 for $18 billion. Bain itself invested more than $1 billion. In 2019, Toshiba Memory was renamed Kioxia.
The deal looked badly timed before AI changed the market
The transaction was controversial from the start.
The article argues that memory is one of the most cyclical corners of semiconductors. By the time Toshiba decided to sell, the sector had already gone through a major upcycle driven by smartphones. When Bain completed the acquisition, the handset market was nearing saturation, replacement cycles were getting longer, demand for memory chips was weakening, and NAND flash prices were already moving into a downturn.
That led to doubts that Bain had bought near the top. What few had expected, the article says, was that AI demand would rewrite the outcome.
From the second half of 2025, growth in AI computing demand made high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, a scarce product. Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and Micron shifted capacity toward higher-end products, tightening supply in consumer storage. By the start of 2026, DRAM and NAND flash prices had hit their highest levels in nearly a decade, and some models had risen by more than 300% on a cumulative basis.
Public equities moved just as sharply. Since June last year, shares of Samsung, SK hynix and Micron had posted peak gains ranging from 5x to more than 10x, according to the article. Kioxia and SanDisk, both tied to NAND, also surged. Over the past year, Kioxia’s share price had climbed to nearly 50x at one point. In mid-June this year, its market capitalization briefly reached JPY 56 trillion, or about $345 billion, overtaking Toyota to become Japan’s most valuable listed company. SanDisk likewise recorded a rise of more than 50x between June 2025 and June this year.
China saw a similar wave. The article cites four Shenzhen-listed storage names — Longsys, Demingli, Biwin Storage and Dapu Micro — whose shares had all at least doubled over the past year. Their combined market value approached RMB 900 billion in mid-June.
Bain started selling in November 2025 and was out by early July
Bain began monetizing the position during that frenzy.
The article says the firm started large-scale reductions in Kioxia in November 2025. By mid-June this year, its stake had fallen from about 44% in December 2025 to about 14%. By early July, the position was gone.
Earlier in July, Bain Capital managing partner David Gross said in an interview, "We no longer hold any shares of Kioxia." Nikkei later estimated that Bain realized roughly JPY 2.5 trillion, or about $17 billion, from the sale of its stake.
On the article’s calculation, that worked out to a return close to 20 times the initial investment and made the deal one of the most notable private equity cases in the semiconductor industry over the past decade.
Years of delays came before the exit window opened
The eventual payoff followed a long wait.
Before Kioxia’s stock surge in 2025, Bain had spent years under pressure. Because of weak consumer electronics demand and collapsing memory prices, Kioxia’s IPO plans failed in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2024.
In 2023, there was also talk of combining Kioxia’s NAND business with Western Digital’s. Had that gone through, the merged company would have surpassed Samsung as the world’s largest NAND manufacturer. The article says the plan failed after strong opposition from SK hynix.
Kioxia did not finally list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange until the end of 2024. Even then, its market debut fell short of expectations. Its valuation was only JPY 750 billion to JPY 780 billion, roughly $5 billion, far below the $18 billion headline price attached to the 2018 acquisition.
The article draws a parallel with CXMT investors
The piece closes by putting Bain’s Kioxia investment alongside the path taken by investors in CXMT, framing both as examples of patient capital in hard tech.
It says that in 2016, before CXMT’s first production line had formally started wafer runs, Hefei state-backed capital invested RMB 14.4 billion in the company. At the time, China had almost no foundation in DRAM technology, equipment or talent, and the bet was described as a gamble. In 2021, when CXMT’s products had not yet reached large-scale volume and the company was still posting losses, firms including Walden and Jishi Capital continued to build positions.
On July 27, CXMT officially listed on the STAR Market with a valuation above RMB 3 trillion, becoming the first hard-tech IPO in A-share history to open with a market capitalization above RMB 1 trillion, according to the article.
The original article was published by the WeChat account "投资界" (ID: pedaily2012) and written by Feng Yuchen.