Chinese memory giants seen grabbing market share on lower prices, more capacity

As the global memory industry rides an unprecedented “super cycle” fuelled by AI demand, China’s leading memory chipmakers are leveraging lower pricing and expanding production to capture a bigger market share, according to analysts.

“Chinese manufacturers often enjoy a price advantage of more than 15 per cent for products of the same specifications, which is highly attractive to the price-sensitive general-purpose server and consumer markets,” said Arisa Liu, chief director and research fellow at Taiwan Industry Economics Services, a unit of the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research.

At the same time, the price gap between Chinese-made memory and global benchmarks was narrowing, according to MS Hwang, a research analyst at Counterpoint Research. Chinese players were gaining market share not necessarily through lower pricing, but “because they have the volume that others lack”, he added.

Leading Chinese memory producers Yangtze Memory Technologies Co (YMTC) and ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) are working on boosting capacity this year.

YMTC was set to start mass production of cutting‑edge NAND products at a new production line in Wuhan, Hubei province, in the second half of 2026, according to a report by South Korean media outlet ChosunBiz last week. YMTC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

With the expansion, YMTC was expected to overtake SK Hynix of South Korea and US-based Micron Technology to become the world’s third-largest NAND maker after Japan’s Kioxia and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics, the report said.