BEIJING, May 19 (Reuters) - China's top flash memory chipmaker YMTC has begun the so-called "tutoring" process for a potential initial public offering, where a company receives formal pre-IPO guidance from an investment bank, a regulatory filing showed on Tuesday.
Yangtze Memory Technologies Co (YMTC) has hired CITIC Securities, a Chinese state-owned investment bank, to guide its IPO preparation ahead of a potential stock market listing.
YMTC's IPO preparations follow that of Hefei-based Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT), which revealed in an updated prospectus on Sunday that it was profitable for the first time in its history last year, while its first quarter revenue jumped more than 700% year on year.
YMTC and CXMT are seen as China's best hopes for establishing a foothold in a global memory chip market long dominated by South Korean and U.S. players such as Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron.
Despite being added to a U.S. trade blacklist in late 2022, which curtailed its access to foreign chipmaking tools, the Wuhan-based company has expanded its use of domestic equipment suppliers such as Naura and is aggressively adding capacity.
The China's largest maker of NAND flash memory chips--that store data in smartphones and computers--has two factories with a combined monthly output of 200,000 wafers.
YMTC's third factory in Wuhan should start operations late this year, and has capacity to produce 50,000 wafers per month by 2027, Reuters has reported previously.
(Reporting by Pan Che, Eduardo Baptista, Shi Bu and Ryan Woo; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Kate Mayberry)
