How China’s GigaDevice and Montage earned a place in the memory chip market

Chinese memory firms GigaDevice Semiconductor and Montage Technology have emerged as new heavyweights in the domestic semiconductor industry, as these companies founded by US-returned Chinese engineers capitalise on the global memory supercycle. Since the two Shanghai-listed companies completed their dual listings in Hong Kong recently, investors have driven up the shares of GigaDevice and Montage by 151 per cent and 97 per cent, respectively. The companies’ listings in January and February represent the rapid progress of China’s tech self-sufficiency initiative. Notably, both companies are founded by Chinese engineers who previously worked in the US semiconductor industry. At the centre of GigaDevice’s rise is Zhu Yiming, who also co-founded ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China’s largest DRAM (dynamic random access memory) maker. Zhu earned his master’s degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and spent nearly a decade in Silicon Valley before returning to Beijing in 2005 to launch GigaDevice. GigaDevice focuses on NOR (not or) flash memory, a type of flash memory where cells are arranged horizontally in a semiconductor. Its chips provide the essential code storage that keeps devices running, from car dashboards to wearable tech. In an area largely dominated by Taiwanese and foreign companies at the time, GigaDevice carved a niche in the mid to low-end electronics market domestically, which eventually led to an initial public offering in Shanghai in 2016. “GigaDevice is benefiting from the triple factors of artificial intelligence development, national tech self-sufficiency and the upwards cycle of the memory industry,” said TF Securities analysts in a research note last week. In the NOR flash market, the company currently ranks second globally with a share of 18.5 per cent, according to TF Securities. Zhu’s true legacy, however, is his role in creating CXMT in 2016. He spearheaded China’s first serious attempt at domestic DRAM manufacturing, forming a partnership between CXMT and GigaDevice. This relationship was solidified in 2024 when GigaDevice secured a 1.9 per cent stake in CXMT. Meanwhile, Howard Yang, Montage Technology’s co-founder, CEO and chairman, decided to focus on the “highways” of data. With a PhD from Oregon State University, Yang at one point worked on chip design and development at US companies such as National Semiconductor, before returning to China in 1994. He co-founded Montage in 2004. Yang zeroed in on another critical niche – memory interconnect chips, the components that manage data flow between processors and memory in massive data centres. “We chose a future-oriented product,” Yang said in an interview with Chinese media 21st Century Business Herald in 2023. “We saw a need for a major technical breakthrough in the interface between memory and CPU [central processing units] … we spent nine years to finally get it right.” His persistence paid off when Intel, the industry leader in CPUs, found Montage’s interconnect chip power consumption to be significantly lower than the global average, leading the US giant to cease development in that area and invest in Montage instead, Yang said. Shanghai-based Montage was the world’s largest memory interconnect chip supplier in 2024, with 38.6 per cent of the market, according to data from Frost & Sullivan. Now, both Montage and GigaDevice are capitalising on the global memory supercycle. The industry is in the grip of a massive supply crunch for memory chips, as a frantic ramp-up of advanced chips to feed demand from AI data centres eats up global wafer capacity, driving up costs across the supply chain. Montage said it expected its net profit to grow between 52 per cent and 66 per cent for 2025, while GigaDevice said it expected a 46 per cent jump in net profit for last year. With the memory supply crunch showing no signs of ebbing any time soon, analysts expect the two companies to continue to benefit. “Having achieved sustainable scale and technical viability, these suppliers are possibly growing from domestic self-sufficiency to global exports amid a supply crunch,” said MS Hwang, a research director at Counterpoint Research. A slew of Chinese memory firms hoping to offer Hong Kong shares “signals a strategic move in how the sector fuels its global ambitions”, said Hwang. In January alone, at least three memory-product makers – Hosin Global Electronics, XTX Technology and Beijing XSKY Technology – submitted their Hong Kong listing applications.

How China’s GigaDevice and Montage earned a place in the memory chip market

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}GigaDevice and Montage carve a niche in the semiconductor sector, with the global memory supercycle boosting their fortunes further

GigaDevice and Montage carve a niche in the semiconductor sector, with the global memory supercycle boosting their fortunes further