Across the Pacific, a leading storage company was fully divested by a private equity firm.
The protagonist is the Japanese memory giant Kioxia—riding the AI tailwind, its stock price once soared nearly 50-fold. As circumstances shifted dramatically, its major shareholder, Bain Capital, revealed that it had completely divested its holdings by July of this year, with total proceeds reaching $17 billion (approximately 115.1 billion RMB).
In other words, Bain Capital realized a profit of 110 billion RMB, setting a global record for returns in private equity history.
"An opportunity like Kioxia is rare and unpredictable; it has been an outstanding outcome for all parties involved," said an executive partner at Bain Capital. Market observers noted that the successful completion of such a large-scale share transaction indicates that demand from buying institutions remains robust.
Like other major memory manufacturers, but different from Changxin Technology which focuses on the DRAM (runtime memory) track, Kioxia primarily produces NAND flash memory. Looking domestically, it's Wuhan-based Yangtze Memory Technologies that is truly advancing in this field.
Looking back to last night, overseas memory giants experienced a sudden shock, with stocks retreating 30% to over 50% from their June highs. On the other hand, Changxin Technology, the new stock king, topped the market with a market cap exceeding 3 trillion RMB. Amidst the calm and frenzy, everyone is watching the future landscape of memory in the AI era.
A Decade Ago, Contrarian Heavy Investment
To sell well, one must also buy at the right time.
Looking back to 2016, Japanese diversified electronics manufacturer Toshiba, due to massive losses incurred by its nuclear subsidiary Westinghouse Electric and compounded by an accounting scandal, fell into insolvency and faced delisting.
That year, the century-old giant Toshiba was in dire straits, forced to sell assets to cover its losses. Its memory business was placed on the divestiture list at that time—however, in the 2017 fiscal year, Toshiba's Memory Division's operating profit was as high as 500 billion yen, arguably its most profitable business then.
In the view of many, given the profitability of Toshiba Memory at the time, waiting a bit longer could have allowed Toshiba to recover without a sale. But as "one can never earn money beyond their cognition," constrained by Toshiba's internal long-term decision-making culture favoring heavy electrical sectors, the memory division requiring continuous high investment was ultimately abandoned.
Spin-off, fundraising, crisis resolution—once the news broke, various bidders flocked.
Throughout 2017, it's reported that at least ten companies participated in the bidding, including Micron, SK Hynix, Western Digital, Broadcom (together with Silver Lake), Amazon, Google, Apple, Foxconn Group, and others.
Finally, the real buyer emerged. Bain Capital, together with SK Hynix, Apple, Dell, Seagate, and others, formed a consortium and in 2018 acquired approximately 55% of Toshiba Memory for $18 billion, with Bain Capital contributing over $1 billion. Later in 2019, Toshiba Memory was renamed Kioxia, establishing its positioning as a memory value service provider.
The story of breaking through fierce competition seemed wonderful, but the deal was not without controversy.
As is well known, the memory industry is highly cyclical. When Toshiba decided to sell, memory had just passed a super cycle driven by smartphone development. By the time Bain Capital's acquisition was finalized, with the smartphone market beginning to hit saturation and replacement cycles lengthening, demand for memory chips softened, and prices for Toshiba Memory's NAND Flash slid into a downturn.
Therefore, many voices at the time considered Bain Capital to have "bought at the peak." No one anticipated that the AI wave and the subsequent explosion in memory demand would completely rewrite its fate.
Landscape Shifts, Selling Amidst the Roar
The epic reversal takes the stage.
Starting in the second half of 2025, explosive growth in AI computing power made High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) a hot commodity. Memory manufacturers like Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron adjusted capacity towards high-end products, significantly squeezing supply for consumer-grade memory. Consequently, memory product prices rose across the board: at the beginning of 2026, DRAM and NAND Flash product prices hit their highest levels in nearly a decade, with cumulative increases for some models even exceeding 300%.
The frenzy first ignited in the capital markets. Memory giants like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, which collectively hold over 90% of the global DRAM market, saw their stock prices soar by 5 to over 10 times from their lows since June last year.
The same goes for NAND producers like Kioxia and SanDisk. Over the past year, Kioxia's stock price surged nearly 50-fold at one point, with its market cap even reaching 56 trillion yen (approximately $345 billion) in mid-June this year, surpassing Toyota to become Japan's most valuable company. SanDisk followed a similar trajectory, with its stock price rising over 50-fold from June 2025 to June this year.
Looking domestically, similar fervor unfolded. A typical example is the "Shenzhen Memory Four Little Dragons"—Longsys, Tech Star, BIWIN, and Dapu Micro—whose stock prices have doubled over the past year, with their combined market cap once nearing 900 billion RMB in mid-June this year.
It was amidst this roar.
Starting in November 2025, Bain Capital began large-scale divestment of its Kioxia holdings. By mid-June this year, its stake had decreased from about 44% in December 2025 to about 14%, until early July this year when Bain Capital completed its full exit.
"We no longer hold any Kioxia shares," David Gross, an executive partner at Bain Capital, formally stated in an interview earlier in July. The latest news, according to Nikkei estimates, is that Bain Capital's sale of its shares realized gains of approximately 2.5 trillion yen (about $17 billion).
Calculated, the return is nearly 20 times the initial investment, creating one of the most classic private equity cases in the global semiconductor industry over the past decade.
Patience, A Little More Patience
Once again proving the victory of patient capital in the hard tech field.
What outsiders may not know is that before Kioxia's stock price surge began in 2025, Bain Capital endured pressure from various sides for several consecutive years:
Due to weak consumer electronics demand and plunging memory prices, Kioxia's IPO plans failed successively in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2024. With no exit via listing, news emerged in 2023 of a merger between Kioxia and Western Digital's NAND business. If successful, this would have created the world's largest NAND manufacturer, surpassing Samsung. However, due to strong opposition from SK Hynix to the merger plan, this strategy to enlarge the pie ultimately fell through.
It wasn't until the end of 2024 that Kioxia finally listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, but its debut performance fell short of expectations. Its overall valuation was only 750-780 billion yen (about $5 billion), significantly lower than the total $18 billion acquisition price paid by Bain Capital years earlier.
Accompanying and waiting during the trough, deserving of praise at the peak.
A similar scene unfolded with investors in Changxin Technology. In 2016, when Changxin Technology hadn't even officially started production on its first production line, Hefei State-owned Capital invested 14.4 billion RMB in Changxin. Against a backdrop where domestic DRAM technology, equipment, and talent were virtually nonexistent, this investment was undoubtedly a bold gamble. Similarly, in 2021, when Changxin's products were not yet mass-produced on a large scale and its performance was still in the red, while most were still watching and hesitating, institutions like Walden International and Cornerstone Capital firmly made heavy investments, enduring five years of solitude.
All sails have passed. On July 27th, Changxin Technology officially listed on the STAR Market with a market cap exceeding 3 trillion RMB, becoming the first hard tech IPO in A-share history to surpass a trillion-yuan market cap at its debut.
Excellent technology companies need time to mature, and rational investment likewise requires patient companionship. On the path of stealthy progress over 5, 8, or even 10 years, "perhaps the pessimists are correct, but the optimists always reap the rewards."
This article is from the WeChat public account "PEdaily" (ID: pedaily2012), author: Feng Yuchen
