Barred by Apple, deprived of America’s most advanced equipment, and blacklisted by Washington…
On paper, YMTC looks like a lame duck. In practice, the Chinese NAND memory maker is preparing to raise nearly $5 billion on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Its valuation after the IPO is expected to range between 275 and 330 billion yuan, or about $41 to $49 billion.
According to the Financial Times, it presented to investors its ambition to become the world’s number one NAND supplier by the end of 2027. In less than ten years, YMTC has become a global heavyweight in flash memory, at the cost of waging an open war with the United States.
YMTC was indeed founded in July 2016 in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province in central China.
For a long time backed by Tsinghua Unigroup and heavy public funding (including the famous “Big Fund,” China’s national fund for integrated circuits), YMTC now boasts a dispersed shareholder base still dominated by state entities.
Its primary shareholder, Hubei Changsheng Development, holds only 26.54% of the capital, and YMTC notes in its prospectus that it does not have a single controlling shareholder.
The company sells its chips as components, consumer-grade SSDs, and embedded UFS memory under its ZHITAI brand.
Xtacking, the Tech Weapon Against Samsung
The main asset behind YMTC is its proprietary Xtacking architecture (unveiled in August 2018). The concept? Build the logic layer and the NAND cells in parallel on two separate wafers, then bond them together using metallic bonding. A break with the traditional approach in which everything is stacked on a single wafer.
According to YMTC, this shortened development time by at least three months and reduced the manufacturing cycle by 20%. And the generations have followed one another at a brisk pace.
In March 2026, YMTC launched its first commercial PCIe 5.0 SSD, the PC550, built around its X4-9070 chip.
The second quarter of 2026 marks a symbolic turning point for YMTC. Driven by demand from Chinese manufacturers and the rise of its latest-generation chips, the maker sees shipments jump 22% year over year.
According to Counterpoint Research, YMTC now accounts for 14% of global NAND shipments by bit, and for the first time climbs onto the global podium (top 3): just behind Samsung (25%) and SK Hynix/Solidigm (22%), ahead of Kioxia (14%).
But this podium hides a more mixed reality: profitability does not follow. In terms of revenue, YMTC sits at the fifth place globally, hampered by consumer-oriented chips and the Chinese market, which are far less lucrative than enterprise SSDs.
According to TrendForce, the value of the market remains led by Samsung (29.3% / $23.06B), followed by SK Hynix (18.2% / $14.27B), Micron (15.1% / $11.85B), and Kioxia (13.6% / $10.72B).
The American Wall and Contested Patents
The financial trajectory of YMTC is nonetheless spectacular.
The prospectus for the Shanghai listing shows revenue of 47 billion yuan (nearly $7 billion) in the first quarter of 2026, almost five times higher than a year earlier. Net profit stands at 33.38 billion yuan (nearly $5 billion), more than double YMTC’s total profit for all of 2025. The average selling price of its NAND chips rose by 173% versus the 2025 average, while gross margin jumped from 35.3% in 2025 to 76.8%.
This success, however, has been built in the face of American headwinds.
At the end of 2022, American sanctions were tightened abruptly. Placed on the “Unverified List” in October, YMTC was moved in December to the BIS Entity List. The consequence: an almost total blockage of any export of equipment, software, or technical assistance from the United States.
Following this, major American equipment makers Applied Materials, KLA, and Lam Research pulled their on-site support in Wuhan.
The sanctions intensified in January 2024, when the U.S. Department of Defense classified YMTC among “Chinese military companies operating in the United States.” A designation with far-reaching consequences, which the manufacturer has vigorously disputed.
First casualty: Apple. The Cupertino company planned to deploy YMTC’s 128-layer chips for iPhones sold in China, covering up to 40% of its memory needs. The project was suspended once YMTC appeared on the Unverified List.
The pressure continued to mount. In November 2025, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) required YMTC to justify its continuing invalidation attacks on Micron patents, challenging its rights as a sanctioned entity. More recently, in July 2026, American lawmakers stepped up to demand strict market access restrictions for allied markets (Europe, Japan, South Korea) against the Chinese manufacturer.
The Counterstrike: All-Chinese Manufacturing
In the face of this pressure, YMTC has pursued a strategy of substitution by leaning on domestic equipment suppliers (Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment, AMEC; Naura Technology Group; and Piotech) for the critical steps of etching and deposition.
According to Morgan Stanley (as cited by Chosun Biz in July 2025), nearly 45% of its advanced equipment already comes from Chinese suppliers. In April 2026, industry reports indicated that Wuhan’s Phase 3 site had surpassed 50% domestic equipment, a first at this scale for a major Chinese memory manufacturer.
Still, the bet remains to be proven: YMTC does not publish an official consolidated production capacity; industry estimates place it at between 130,000 and 150,000 wafers per month by late 2024, roughly 8% of the world’s NAND supply according to DigiTimes.
The IPO as a Litmus Test
The funds raised through the Shanghai listing will directly fuel this push for self-reliance. Of the target 33 billion yuan, most (20.8 billion) will be channeled into modernization and expansion of production capacity. The remaining 12.2 billion will finance R&D to design the next generation of NAND chips and high-speed storage solutions.
It also follows in the wake of its Chinese rival CXMT, which raised $8.6 billion (potentially up to $9.8 billion with the over-allotment option) in late July on the STAR Market — the largest IPO yet for a Chinese semiconductor manufacturer.
But Shanghai’s approval of YMTC’s filing is not guaranteed. The process still must pass the review of the stock exchange and registration with China’s market regulator, the CSRC.
