ChangXin Technology drew intense attention after its first trading day pushed its valuation to RMB 3.3 trillion. In a PANews commentary, author Haotian wrote that the frenzy says more about how the market is pricing the company than about a simple domestic substitution trade.
The valuation case goes beyond a China replacement narrative
According to the article, investors are not valuing ChangXin purely as a local substitute for imported memory chips. The bigger point, Haotian argues, is that the company has broken into a global DRAM market that had been dominated for decades by Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, effectively creating a “fourth pole.”
The commentary says the three established players had long controlled more than 90% of the market, giving them concentrated pricing power. Industry cycles, it notes, were largely shaped by their production cadence and inventory strategy. ChangXin, which started from scratch, had lifted its global market share to about 7.7%-8% by the first quarter of 2026, according to the piece.
At the same time, the three incumbents have been moving their most advanced capacity toward higher-margin high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. That shift, the article says, has systemically squeezed supply of general-purpose DRAM used in smartphones, personal computers, and standard servers. ChangXin is described as filling that structural gap.
Haotian’s core argument is that China’s market now has enough weight to influence supply-demand dynamics and pricing elasticity. In that context, the arrival of a DRAM “fourth pole” could narrow the room for the three incumbents to jointly shape prices, and that, in his view, is the deeper reason behind the company’s market pricing.
A Hefei state-capital case study and what it could mean for A-shares
The article also turns to Hefei state capital, which has often been praised for investment returns over the past decade. Haotian writes that the broader significance may not just be financial performance. He says the ChangXin case could alter both valuation logic and investor appetite in China’s A-share semiconductor market.
Before ChangXin, the STAR Market memory segment had long been characterized as having design companies but no leading manufacturing heavyweight. In that setting, institutions such as pension funds, index funds, and foreign investors lacked a large-cap anchor that could be allocated within a global industry framework.
In the article’s telling, ChangXin serves as proof that A-share hard-tech names do not have to be limited to smaller, more volatile stories. The market, it says, may also be able to produce manufacturing leaders that can be compared directly with global peers.
Haotian argues that this could lower financing difficulty for later large-scale projects. He also says it may tilt the STAR Market away from a structure driven mainly by retail investors and themes, and closer to one led by institutions and earnings, drawing in more long-term capital.
Short-term liquidity squeeze concerns and the role of float structure
The commentary does not ignore valuation concerns. It notes that some investors are asking whether ChangXin’s stretched short-term pricing could create a prolonged liquidity drain similar to what the market once associated with PetroChina and SMIC. Haotian also mentions lingering concern after @SpaceX’s impact on the broader U.S. AI tech sector.
Still, the piece says the trading structure matters. On the first day, only about 6.7% of ChangXin’s shares were freely tradable, or roughly 4.5 billion shares, while more than 90% were locked up. With no price limits during the first five trading days, a very small pool of available shares was chased by a large amount of capital, naturally producing a scarcity premium.
The article points to a sharp drop in Gigadevice on the same day as evidence that market expectations are shifting from “concepts” to “real manufacturing leaders.” In Haotian’s view, that may pull funds away from older, more theme-driven names in the near term. Over a longer horizon, though, he argues that capital rotating from narrative trades into manufacturers with real capacity is not necessarily negative. Under a new round of structural repricing, companies backed by actual production capacity and supply-chain demand could be rediscovered.