Chip stocks sank on Tuesday after a Chinese memory chipmaker said it had made significant progress in developing new and more efficient designs. ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, announced over the weekend that it had made headway on new architecture that will increase memory density by packing more data into a smaller space.
CXMT is China’s leading rival to global memory makers, including Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung, and the news sent rival names tumbling. Micron sank 5% on Tuesday, while SK Hynix’s South Korean-listed shares closed 10% lower and Samsung Electronics fell 7.4%. Other memory-related stocks, including SanDisk, Seagate and Western Digital, all fell as well.
Until its summer blockbuster IPO, CXMT was little known outside of its home market.
