YMTC Climbs to No. 3 in Global NAND Shipments

"LPDDR5, a low-power DRAM developed by China's memory semiconductor company ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT). (Photo captured from the CXMT website) China’s largest NAND flash company, Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC), has risen to third place globally in terms of shipments in the global NAND market, rapidly chasing Samsung Electronics and SK hynix. Despite the United States’ export regulations on advanced semiconductor equipment, the company has increased its market share by leveraging its proprietary stacking technology and massive domestic demand. YMTC is also accelerating its production capacity expansion and entry into the high value-added product market by raising funds through an initial public offering (IPO). According to market research firm Counterpoint Research on Oct. 14, YMTC’s global NAND shipment share in the second quarter of this year was tallied at 16.5%. Following Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, it ranked third in the world, surpassing Japan’s Kioxia and the U.S.’s Micron. If Solidigm, the U.S. subsidiary of SK hynix, is classified as a separate company, YMTC is the second largest in the world. YMTC aims to expand its NAND market share to 20% in the long term. Its revenue growth is also steep. YMTC’s global NAND revenue share rose by 5 percentage points in one year from 9% in the first quarter of last year to 14% in the first quarter of this year. This is the fastest increase among major NAND companies. Counterpoint Research forecast that YMTC’s revenue growth rate this year will reach six times the industry average. However, due to a relatively low proportion of high-priced enterprise products, its ranking based on second-quarter revenue remained at fifth in the world. Behind YMTC’s rapid growth is its proprietary semiconductor stacking technology, ‘Xtacking.’ This is a technology that manufactures memory cells, which store data, and peripheral circuits, which control them, on separate wafers and then combines them. Because it can increase the number of NAND stacked layers using existing equipment without cutting-edge lithography equipment, it is evaluated as a core technology for responding to U.S. export regulations. YMTC is expanding its scope beyond NAND for smartphones and PCs into the enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) market used in artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. As the demand for server storage devices surges due to the spread of AI, the strategy is to increase profitability by expanding the proportion of high value-added products. Counterpoint Research predicted that YMTC’s server-related revenue share, which was virtually nonexistent in 2024, will reach about 39% of the total in 2028. It has also begun securing funds for large-scale capacity expansion. YMTC applied for listing on the Science and Technology Innovation Board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange in August this year. Through the initial public offering, it plans to raise about 33 billion yuan (about 7 trillion won or 5 billion) and invest it in expanding production facilities and research and development (R&D). However, whether it can secure global clients beyond the Chinese domestic market is considered the key to future growth. Counterpoint Research analyzed that whether YMTC can expand its supply chain to clients outside of China will be the core variable determining whether it can challenge the world’s number one, Samsung Electronics.