Agencies
Japanese chipmaker Kioxia Holdings Corp has applied to list its shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, possibly in October, in what is expected to be the biggest initial public offering this year, sources familiar with the matter said Friday.
The leading NAND flash memory chip maker is aiming to achieve a market capitalization of 1.5 trillion yen ($10.3 billion), the sources said, with the manufacturer saying it is preparing to list its shares "at an appropriate time.”
The company posted record quarterly sales of 428.5 billion yen in the April-June period, up 70.6 percent from a year earlier, driven by robust demand for chips used for data centers on the back of the recent artificial intelligence boom. The listing application comes after Kioxia and its U.S. peer Western Digital Corp decided to halt merger talks late last year.
The planned merger would have created the world’s leading producer of memory chips for PCs and smartphones, but the two companies found it difficult to gain approval from South Korea’s SK Hynix Inc, a major investor in Kioxia, according to the sources.
Kioxia plans to resume the merger talks with Western Digital after the listing as the move is expected to undermine SK Hynix’s influence over the chipmaker, the sources said. Kioxia initially planned to list in 2020, but the firm postponed the plan as heightened U.S.-China tensions clouded its business outlook.
The chipmaker was spun off from Toshiba Corp in 2017 and was renamed in 2019. The Japanese tech conglomerate still owns about 40 percent of Kioxia.
The global semiconductor market is expected to grow 12.5 percent in 2025 from the previous year to a record $687.38 billion, heading for the second straight year of increase, as demand for chips used for AI continues to expand, an industry organization forecast showed.