China's A-share chip profits jump ~6× — CXMT and SMIC own the tape, not the keynote

What happened

集微咨询 (ijiwei), in a mid-September 2026 mid-year tally by Li Zhengcao, counted 186 A-share semiconductor companies at a combined attributable net profit of 160.506 billion yuan in the first half of 2026, up 607.2% from a year earlier. Attributable net profit is the profit assigned to shareholders. TrendForce’s September 23 English synthesis carries the same total, 160.51 billion yuan, up 607.2%. Nikkei Asia’s September 24 Shanghai piece, by Tomoko Wakasugi, frames a “more than 600%” surge, and the headline says 620%, for English readers. The rest of that Nikkei piece is behind a paywall, so the figures below follow ijiwei and TrendForce. Nikkei is the English headline around the same boom.

On revenue, ijiwei and TrendForce put CXMT (长鑫科技) first at 150.31 billion yuan, up 873.64% year on year. CXMT is China’s domestic DRAM maker, and the tally ties that jump to tight global supply and rising prices. CECport (中电港) is second at 73.56 billion yuan, up 164.19%, on distribution through the memory boom. SMIC (中芯国际) is third at 38.635 billion yuan, up 19.4%. ijiwei cites strong demand for chips tied to AI and some return of overseas orders.

On attributable profit, CXMT is first at 77.605 billion yuan. In ijiwei’s comparison, the prior-year period was a loss of 2.332 billion yuan. Longsys (江波龙) is second at 10.577 billion yuan. Biwin (佰维存储) is third at 7.166 billion yuan, after a loss in the prior-year period. The memory supply chain takes six of the top ten revenue seats and five of the top ten profit seats.

Tools and chip design show up in the same tally. Naura (北方华创) reported revenue of 20.161 billion yuan, up 24.90%, on etch and thin-film deposition shipments. AMEC (中微公司) reported attributable net profit up 300.22% year on year, in both ijiwei and TrendForce. Nikkei’s lead calls AMEC’s first-half profit a “quadruple,” which may be a different framing or a different rounding, so this account uses the ijiwei percentage until the full Nikkei text is available. Cambricon more than doubled both revenue and profit, according to TrendForce. Tongfu and JCET gained from high-performance computing packaging demand, also according to TrendForce. SMIC’s attributable profit was 4.467 billion yuan, up 94.2%, per ijiwei.

A product step already on the record sits under those rankings. Reuters reported on September 20 that CXMT said its fifth-generation DRAM platform had entered mass production, with a claimed gross-die increase of at least 50% versus the fourth generation and 24-gigabit LPDDR5X already in production. That commodity DRAM step helps explain why CXMT leads both lists. It is a different chapter from CXMT’s early HBM work, where trial yields have been reported around 25%. The two stay in separate lanes.

Why it matters

A 607.2% rise in attributable profit across 186 listed names is the memory boom, and domestic substitution, showing up in half-year filings. CXMT’s lead on both revenue and profit is a DRAM price-and-volume story. SMIC’s steadier 19.4% revenue increase is a foundry seeing demand for chips tied to AI. Naura, AMEC, Tongfu, and JCET are the tool and packaging spillover.

Readers who want more than one geography making memory and tools can use the balance sheets. Those filings do not show Chinese HBM matching Samsung or SK hynix. Commodity DRAM results and HBM results answer different questions.

What to watch is second-half DRAM pricing and CXMT factory utilization; whether SMIC’s mix of AI-related work holds in third-quarter commentary; how AMEC and Naura order books compare with that roughly 300% profit jump and Naura’s roughly 25% revenue increase; how much of JCET and Tongfu revenue is AI packaging; and any update from a major outlet on CXMT HBM yields. These half-year rankings do not make that HBM connection.

The commodity DRAM step under the rankings is CXMT’s fifth-generation platform. The early HBM yield band is CXMT’s small-batch HBM3E. The Korean volume story beside them is Samsung’s HBM4 yield near 80%.