CXMT Earnings Boom Cools to 1-4 Percent Quarterly Growth as DRAM Price Gains Moderate

CXMT used an extraordinary shareholders' meeting on Oct 19 to sketch out its earnings ahead of an Oct 31 release, guiding to revenue of RMB 265-270 billion for the first nine months of 2026, up more than sevenfold year on year, and net profit attributable to shareholders of RMB 131-132.5 billion against a net loss of RMB 5.3 billion in the same period last year. The quarterly detail is where the story turns: third-quarter revenue is projected at RMB 114.69-119.69 billion, up 15.25-20.28% sequentially, but net profit is seen at RMB 53.40-54.90 billion, growth of just 1-4% over the second quarter.

That is a sharp break from the first half, when CXMT's net profit more than doubled to RMB 52.84 billion in the second quarter. Eastmoney attributes the cooling to moderating DRAM price gains narrowing the room for further profit expansion. The affordability ceiling is showing up downstream too: TrendForce projects more moderate contract price increases of 13-18% quarter on quarter for conventional DRAM and 10-15% for NAND flash in the third quarter, noting that record-high memory prices are pushing PC and smartphone customers toward their affordability limits.

The pricing tailwind that powered 2025 was extraordinary and was never going to repeat. DDR and LPDDR average selling prices climbed 61% and 24.46% year on year respectively, driving revenue growth of 515.36% and 105.59%; in the first half of 2026 DDR revenue reached RMB 69.47 billion and LPDDR revenue RMB 78.19 billion before third-quarter price moderation began to bite. Chinese module maker Longsys shows the same inflection more brutally: after net profit rose from RMB 3.86 billion in the first quarter to RMB 6.72 billion in the second, its third-quarter profit is guided to RMB 3.42-4.32 billion, a sequential decline of as much as 49%.

Capacity spending now sets the floor under costs. CXMT disclosed depreciation expenses up 27.85% year on year to RMB 14.51 billion in the first half, with continued investment expected to keep pressure on earnings. It operates two 12-inch DRAM fabs in Hefei and one in Beijing, each with monthly capacity of up to 100,000 wafers, is expanding its Hefei testing facility and is building new DRAM and HBM lines in Shanghai; management says all fabs are running at high utilisation on full order books. A separate new demand vector is emerging: Micron told SEDEX 2026 that it is developing edge inference memory stacking low-power DRAM on a logic die for physical AI, with mass production seen in the second half of 2028, and it estimates a humanoid robot could eventually need more than 200GB of DRAM and several terabytes of NAND against 12GB and 256GB in today's service robots.