By Greg Gao

(JW Insights) Mar 2 -- China’s National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, or Big Fund, took a stake in the country’s leading memory chip maker, Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp(YMTC), with an investment of RMB 12.9 billion(about $1.87 billion), according to a government website that discloses company registration information.

The capital injection from the second phase of the Big Fund, as China’s signature state-owned investment vehicle in the semiconductor field, amounts to RMB12,886,734,904, and the date of contribution is January 31, 2023, information from the website shows.

At the same time, the website shows that YMTC underwent a number of industrial and commercial registration information changes on 27 February 2023, including business scope, investors, registered capital, and articles of incorporation.

YMTC’s related executives said in response that they had not received information about the changes, according to a Shanghai-based finance media.

Established in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, in July 2016, YMTC is an IDM semiconductor company focusing on the design and manufacturing of 3D NAND flash memory with complete memory solutions. The company’s products and solutions also include embedded memory solutions, and consumer and enterprise SSDs, which are widely used in mobile devices, consumer electronics, computers, servers, and data centers.

The company is one of a handful of domestic chipmakers in China that compete with South Korean giants Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and US giant Micron in memory chips for a multitude of applications. The firm was short listed by Apple as a memory chip supplier to its iPhone 14 and dropped it after US placed export control on it last year, according to media reports.