50 billion yuan, the brothers from Sichuan have made a massive fortune.

A new stock king has emerged in Sichuan.

This week, Chengdu Superpure Applied Materials Co., Ltd. (abbreviated as "Superpure Applied Materials") officially debuted its IPO on the ChiNext board. Its share price skyrocketed on the first trading day, surging by over 700% at one point during intraday trading, pushing its market capitalisation past the 50 billion yuan threshold.

With an opening price of 450 yuan per share, Superpure Applied Materials overtook Eoptolink to become the A-share Sichuan-listed company with the highest stock price. By the close of trading on Friday, its share price had risen to 538 yuan per share.

This surge not only sent the net worth of Superpure Applied Materials' two founders, brothers Chai Jie and Chai Lin, soaring, but also brought tangible, substantial returns to a group of core employees and technical backbones who joined the company in its early days. Another hard-tech wealth creation story has unfolded on the ChiNext board.

Sichuan Brothers Ring the Bell Together, Stock Up 700% on Debut

This is an entrepreneurial story of two brothers working in partnership.

The younger brother, Chai Jie, graduated with a bachelor's degree in radio technology from Nanjing University of Science and Technology. After a short stint at the Southwest Institute of Technical Physics, he entered the foreign trade industry. During that period, Chai Jie clearly realized that precision semiconductor materials would be a critical fortress that China's manufacturing industry must conquer in the future.

It was not until 2005 that he made a bold decision: to resign and start his own business. Chai Jie founded Superpure Applied Materials in Shuangliu District, Chengdu. The company initially focused on special ceramics and precision machining, but its long-term goal was always advanced manufacturing coated components — a field that had long been monopolized by overseas giants at that time.

Entrepreneurship is brutal. Facing a market monopolized by giants including South Korea's KoMiCo and Japan's TOCALO, Superpure Applied Materials barely had a foothold. To survive and raise funds for R&D, the company had to rely on revenue from businesses such as precision optics and aerospace special ceramics to "transfuse blood" for its core operations.

By 2008, the older brother Chai Lin officially joined the company full-time, becoming another key driving force for Superpure Applied Materials. A graduate of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chai Lin has a professional background in core technologies for precision optics and special coatings. He previously worked at the Chengdu Precision Optical Engineering Research Center, and later served as a senior engineer at the Beijing Representative Office of Germany's Leybold Optics, gaining in-depth exposure to the world's top coating manufacturing processes.

The two brothers have a clear division of responsibilities in the company. Chai Jie serves as Chairman and General Manager, overseeing overall business operations and market expansion; Chai Lin is Director and Chief Engineer, taking full charge of R&D and process breakthroughs. After Chai Lin took full control of Superpure Applied Materials' R&D system, the company's strategic focus was fully shifted to the track of special coated components for semiconductor equipment starting in 2009.

At that time, there were no domestic reference samples, and almost everything had to be tested and corrected from scratch. Even if qualified samples were produced in the laboratory, the products had to withstand plasma bombardment and highly corrosive gases inside etchers, and be produced tens of thousands of times without any errors.

A turning point came in 2011. After multiple rounds of rigorous testing, Superpure Applied Materials officially entered the supply chain of Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc. China, obtaining a truly critical admission ticket to the semiconductor track — this was also the first time that domestically produced special coated components entered the procurement system of a leading domestic etcher equipment manufacturer. In 2016, the company's products began to be supplied in batches to Naura Technology, expanding the landscape of domestic substitution.

In 2020, Superpure Applied Materials achieved a technological leap, with its products compatible with 5nm process etchers, truly reaching the global advanced process technology threshold and becoming one of the few domestic enterprises that have mastered the mass production capacity for coatings of this level. From 2023 to 2025, the company's revenue grew from 169 million yuan to 496 million yuan, with a three-year compound annual growth rate of over 71%. The revenue proportion of its semiconductor coated components business exceeded 95%, and Superpure Applied Materials has grown into a national-level key "Little Giant" enterprise specializing in sophisticated and unique technologies.

The moment of ringing the listing bell came 21 years after Chai Jie founded the company — the stock skyrocketed after the market opened, surging over 700% on the first trading day, and the decades-long entrepreneurial journey of the two Sichuan brothers finally reaped its rewards.

Superior Returns, a Group of Employees See Their Net Worth Surge

This is the most profitable new stock on the ChiNext board this year.

The issue price of Superpure Applied Materials is 65.99 yuan. Calculated based on 500 shares per lot for new share subscription, the opening price of 450 yuan corresponds to a floating profit of about 192,000 yuan per lot; the intraday peak of 554.73 yuan brings a maximum paper floating profit of nearly 244,400 yuan per lot; calculated based on the closing price of 503 yuan, the floating profit per lot is also close to 220,000 yuan, refreshing the new share subscription return record for ChiNext stocks after the implementation of the registration system.

Converting more than two decades of entrepreneurial accumulation into tangible wealth visible in the capital market, this dividend first flows to the two brothers Chai Jie and Chai Lin who steer the enterprise — according to the prospectus, the two brothers hold a combined 46.88% of the shares directly, corresponding to a total paper market value of about 24.02 billion yuan on the first day of listing.

It is worth noting that Superpure Applied Materials' employees also get to share the joy of this IPO.

According to the prospectus, Superpure Applied Materials has built a two-tier employee incentive system —

The first tier consists of two limited partnership employee shareholding platforms, Jiaze Hechang and Jiatie Hexin, covering the company's early core backbones in R&D, sales, and production management;

The second tier is the Huatai Superpure Share Home No.1 ChiNext Employee Asset Management Plan, which strategically places 2.546 million shares, accounting for 10% of the total new shares issued this time, covering more than 200 people including factory supervisors, R&D engineers, process technicians, and core business managers, with a 12-month lock-up period.

For these frontline technical and business personnel, this listing dividend does not come from short-term speculation, but is the return given by time. By tying personal growth to the enterprise's breakthrough and persisting in the long-term technological research, ordinary practitioners can also share the value brought by the rise of the hard-tech industry.

Of course, the investors behind the company also get their share.

SDIC Venture Capital, the earliest institutional investor, invested in Superpure Applied Materials in June 2022, and eventually became the company's third largest shareholder with a 6.33% stake. Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc. China is not only a major customer of Superpure Applied Materials, but also the earliest industrial capital to invest in it, holding a 4.26% stake before the IPO.

There is also BYD, which spent 96.9 million yuan to transfer old shares and subscribe for new registered capital in April 2024, eventually holding a 4.58% stake and ranking as the fourth largest shareholder. Including the strategic placement in this IPO, BYD has invested a total of 126.9 million yuan to acquire shares, and its current paper floating profit exceeds 1.8 billion yuan.

Other investors include Jidian Industrial Investment, Shangqi Capital, TCL Venture Capital, Capital Estate, Suzhou Woyan Capital, Zhenghai Capital, Gaoxin Xindongneng, and Fengnian Capital, etc. In the strategic placement round, Shanghai Xinshi Times under Huahua Group, Changceng Hongtu associated with Yangtze Memory Technologies, Beijing Electronic Control Industry Investment, Chengdu Gaotou, and CNNC Capital, etc. increased their holdings.

Staying in Hometown, New Chengdu Upstarts Rise

Looking at this wave of development, a group of local tech upstarts rooted in Sichuan are emerging.

The most impressive one is Eoptolink, the core leader in the AI computing power chain. Its founder Gao Guangrong is from Leshan, but he has based almost all of his business in Chengdu. Having been deeply engaged in the optical communication track for more than ten years, he did not choose to move to the well-developed optical communication industry hubs in Shenzhen or Suzhou, but set up all his entrepreneurial, R&D and manufacturing operations in Chengdu, achieving mutual success with the local region.

Along with the global AI computing power wave, Eoptolink's market capitalisation has exceeded 600 billion yuan, making it a benchmark enterprise in China's optical module industry.

Coincidentally, the headquarters of Eoptolink and Superpure Applied Materials are only a dozen minutes' drive apart, both located in the Shuangliu Industrial Park, forming a unique industrial landscape.

Looking further along the industrial chain, more local sci-tech innovation forces are taking root in Chengdu.

In the biomedical track, Blueray Biopharma started from Wenjiang, Chengdu. Its founder Zhu Yi is based in Sichuan, focusing on the R&D of bispecific antibodies and ADC innovative drugs, securing overseas cooperation orders worth billions of US dollars, and growing into a non-negligible force in China's innovative drug sector. A few days ago, Blueray Biopharma, with an A-share market value of over 120 billion yuan, has submitted a listing application to the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, officially striving for "A+H" dual listing.

Different from some regions that only produce founders who start their businesses far away from home, Chengdu's unique trait is that a large number of tech entrepreneurs choose to build the starting point of their careers in their hometown.

When enterprises grow bigger, they in turn nourish the local industrial ecosystem — just as Superpure Applied Materials expands its Meishan production base, driving the settlement of upstream and downstream supporting enterprises; Eoptolink drives the development of the Shuangliu optoelectronic industrial cluster, attracting a group of optical communication supporting enterprises to gather; scientific research achievements from universities continue to be industrialized, and cases of professors and engineers starting their own businesses are on the rise.

The public often discusses that coastal regions have more mature industrial chains and capital environments, but Chengdu offers an alternative model: sci-tech innovation enterprises do not all have to move to Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzhen. As long as there are talents and patience for industrial development, inland cities can also nurture segmented leading enterprises that break overseas monopolies.

This is the best era for hard technologies.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Investment" (ID: pedaily2012), written by Yang Jiyun, and published with authorization from 36Kr.