YMTC wants to be the world's biggest NAND flash maker by the end of 2027, and it's not exactly hiding that ambition. According to the Financial Times, citing people familiar with the matter, the Chinese memory maker told investors during recent IPO prep meetings that it plans to overtake both Samsung and SK hynix within the next year and a half.
That's a big jump. YMTC currently sits in third place globally, with somewhere around 13-14% of the NAND bit shipment market depending on which quarter's data you check, according to Counterpoint Research. Samsung leads with roughly 25%-29% of the market, and SK hynix isn't far behind at over 20%. So YMTC would need to more than double its share just to catch up, let alone take the top spot.
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Still, the company has momentum on its side. It reportedly pulled in around $7 billion in first-quarter revenue, more than double what it made across all of 2025, and it's preparing a nearly $5 billion IPO on Shanghai's STAR Market.
Most of that money is apparently earmarked for upgrading production lines and funding next-gen NAND research, following a similar path to CXMT, the Chinese DRAM maker whose own IPO reportedly surged over 400% on its debut day earlier this year.
We've already seen signs of YMTC pushing into markets it previously struggled to reach. TweakTown reported earlier this month that YMTC had climbed to third place in global NAND shipments, and back in July, Lenovo started shipping some ThinkBook laptops with YMTC SSDs as supply from bigger names got tight.
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YMTC is still ramping up enterprise SSD production, which is where the real margins are these days, and it's doing all of this while working around US export restrictions on chipmaking tools. However, given how fast the company has grown its shipment share this year, and with fresh IPO cash reportedly on the way, it's not a target anyone in the industry seems willing to write off just yet.
