Zhu Yiming distributed 30 billion yuan to employees.

The most generous boss in the A-share market has emerged.

Yesterday, Changxin Technology officially listed on the STAR Market, with a market capitalization exceeding 3 trillion yuan, making it the new king of the A-share market. Unlike previous IPO feasts, this time more employees will also share the joy of the IPO —

The prospectus shows: The company's founder and chairman Zhu Yiming voluntarily promised to distribute half of his 1.536 billion shares to employees. Calculated based on a market capitalization of 3 trillion yuan, the market value corresponding to these shares exceeds 34 billion yuan, which is rare in the A-share market.

Over the ten years of development, Changxin has not only achieved the leap from 0 to 1 in China's semiconductor industry's storage track, but also left tens of thousands of highly educated talents in Hefei. A group of people changed an entire industry, and one enterprise transformed a city.

Now, the boss is distributing real money to employees. The war for talent has never been so profound and tangible.

Not Seeking to Be the Richest Man, Zhu Yiming Distributes Wealth to Employees

What is rare is that this incentive plan is entirely a voluntary benefit concession from the founder, without diluting the equity of any external shareholders.

According to the prospectus, the board of directors of Changxin Technology once granted Zhu Yiming 1.536 billion shares, in recognition of his historical contributions to the ten-year effort to develop the domestic DRAM industry, with a grant cost of only 0.108 yuan per registered capital.

Zhu Yiming voluntarily promised: 50% of his shares, totaling 768 million shares, will be fully used for employee incentives, with himself excluded from the incentive recipients. No new company shares will be added throughout the process, so the rights and interests of investors including Hefei State-owned Assets, the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Phase II, Alibaba, and Tencent will not be diluted at all.

After Changxin's stock price surged sharply at opening yesterday, calculated based on a total market capitalization of 3 trillion yuan, the corresponding market value of these shares reaches 34.45 billion yuan; calculated based on the closing market capitalization exceeding 3.2 trillion yuan yesterday, the corresponding market value hits 36.75 billion yuan.

Different from most enterprises in the market that launch employee incentives through issuing new shares or repurchasing shares, making all shareholders bear the incentive cost together, Zhu Yiming directly slices the cake from his own held equity, genuinely "cutting his own wealth to share with the team".

For countless technicians rooted in the front line of domestic chip development, this equity promise worth tens of billions of yuan, clearly written into the listing documents, is the most substantial feedback for their ten years of silent hard work.

In accordance with the rules, this share distribution is set with three layers of time constraints: The formal distribution will be officially launched after the company has been listed for 36 full months (a three-year cooling-off period); the plan will be implemented in two five-year cycles in total, with 384 million shares distributed in the first five years, and the remaining 384 million shares distributed in batches from the sixth to the tenth year; the distribution methods are divided into two forms: directly granting partnership shares to employees, or distributing cash proceeds to employees after reducing holdings of shares.

Of course, this plan comes with strong binding constraints: if an employee leaves the company before the shares are fully vested, the remaining unvested shares will be taken back, so as to deeply bind talents across the entire R&D and manufacturing chain, matching the industrial cycle of storage chips that spans more than ten years.

In addition, Zhu Yiming also promised an extremely long share lock-up period: he will not transfer the shares he holds in the first ten years after listing, and he can reduce his holdings by a maximum of 20% per year in the second ten years. This means that the vast majority of the equity in his hands will not flow into the secondary market for cashing out for at least 20 years.

In this way, Zhu Yiming has firmly tied his personal wealth to the path of Changxin Technology's breakthrough in domestic storage technology.

A Long-Awaited Return in the Venture Capital Circle

Changxin's ten-year entrepreneurial journey has not been smooth sailing.

In 2016, Zhu Yiming led GigaDevice to successfully list on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Although he achieved personal financial freedom, he did not choose to stop. At that time, DRAM — the largest single category in the semiconductor industry — had long been monopolized by three companies: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, with almost no domestic presence. Zhu Yiming was determined to fill this gap.

From the very beginning, Zhu Yiming encountered repeated setbacks. He visited many cities but got no results, until Hefei extended an olive branch — after in-depth research, the two sides hit it off immediately and launched Changxin Technology's dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chip base with a total investment of 150 billion yuan.

Changxin's story was able to begin.

But difficulties still remained. "At that time, few people believed in domestic DRAM. IBM's fabs had closed down, and even Germany and Japan, with their national efforts, failed to make the storage industry successful." Peng Guie, managing partner of Huadeng Hi-Tech, who later participated in the investment, recalled to us that almost all mainstream institutions in the market avoided this project at that time.

This is not difficult to understand. During the years when Changxin was raising funds, the industry and capital cycles were in a downturn, and investment market confidence was low during the pandemic, while the boom of the STAR Market had cooled down.

Especially in 2021, Changxin Technology launched a new round of financing. But at that time, the company's products had not yet achieved large-scale mass production, its financial data was still in loss, and the path of technological catch-up was full of uncertainty. Yang Shengjun, a partner of Capital Elite, still remembers that most institutions held a pessimistic attitude at that time, coupled with Changxin's not-low valuation, there were very few institutions that were truly willing to continue to follow up with investments.

Looking back now, the investors who were willing to choose to trust at the beginning are extremely precious, and they deserve this long-awaited return.

Among them, Hefei State-owned Assets has become the biggest winner. At that time, Hefei State-owned Assets took on extremely high "death risk". According to the prospectus, entities including Qinghui Jidian, Changxin Integration, and Hefei Jixin hold a combined shareholding ratio of about 45.16% in Changxin Technology before its issuance, of which the Hefei State-owned Assets system holds a combined shareholding of about 36.79%. Calculated based on a market capitalization of 3 trillion yuan, the market value corresponding to Hefei State-owned Assets' shareholding exceeds 1.1 trillion yuan.

Industrial investors who entered across industries finally breathed a sigh of relief. Investors with heavy positions like Alibaba — in June 2025, in the last round of financing before Changxin Technology's listing, Alibaba Cloud, as the largest investor in that round, invested a huge sum of 6.1 billion yuan at one go, holding 3.85% of the shares. Adding Alibaba's previous investments, the Alibaba system holds a total of 4.97% of the shares in Changxin Technology. At present, the market value of the Alibaba system's shareholding is nearly 160 billion yuan.

Tencent's 1.50% shareholding ratio is second only to the Alibaba system among industrial capitals, and the corresponding market value of its shareholding is also 48 billion yuan. There is also NIO, whose floating profit from investing in Changxin Technology exceeds 700 million yuan; BYD invested 50 million yuan during Changxin Technology's difficult financing period in 2020; as well as Midea, TCL, Xiaomi, and other enterprises.

There is also a long list of VC/PE institutions — the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Phase II, the National Structural Adjustment Fund, CICC Capital, Capital Elite, Legend Capital, Yanchuang Venture Capital, China Merchants Capital, Walden International, Qianhai Mother Fund, Shenzhen Investment Holdings, CCB International, Yunfeng Fund, Greater Bay Area Fund, CCB Trust Investment, China Life Investment, Hengxu Capital, Anhui Investment Group, Junhe Capital, China Orient Asset Management, Hexie Health Insurance, Yangguang Insurance, Guangzhou Xinde, Lanpu Investment, Xinke Venture Capital, HuFu JiaYe, Advantage Capital, Xinding Capital, Gaoxin Capital, Pro Capital, Xingqi Daohu, as well as the AIC platforms of state-owned banks including CCB, ICBC, ABC, BOC, BOCOM, and many more, too numerous to list.

Those who persisted finally received the gift of time.

Retaining Talents

"Joining a good company is the best investment."

Looking back at this wave of wealth creation driven by the technology industry, ordinary individuals are receiving more and more positive feedback. Just like another company with a market capitalization of one trillion yuan — Zhongji Innolight, a group of its employees have realized their wealth dreams — since the beginning of this year, the vesting conditions for multiple phases of Zhongji Innolight's equity incentive plans have been met. In May, 803 employees of Zhongji Innolight will be able to vest 1.63 million shares, which were worth more than 1.7 billion yuan based on the stock price at that time.

The dividends of the times are quietly flowing to the hardworking employees who focus on their work.

Previously, Kunlun Wanwei announced in its public notice that it plans to grant restricted stocks to 786 core employees, with a total value of about 1.4 billion yuan. Similarly, this incentive will not be fully vested at one time — the maximum validity period of this plan is no more than 48 months, and it will be vested in three phases after 12 months from the grant date, with the proportions being 33%, 33%, and 34% respectively. In other words, Kunlun Wanwei will use the next four years to bind this group of core employees more closely with the company.

The scene of distributing wealth is happening intensively.

Earlier this year, SK Hynix announced its performance bonus for fiscal year 2025. The per capita bonus of its 33,000 employees reached 140 million won, equivalent to more than 600,000 yuan. According to estimates by international consulting institutions such as Macquarie, based on current performance expectations, the per capita bonus income of SK Hynix employees in 2026 is expected to reach as high as 670 million won, equivalent to about 3.12 million yuan. For a while, SK Hynix's employees became the "top-tier" in South Korea's workplace.

For employees, choosing a company that is on an upward growth track, and exchanging time and professional capabilities for value, has become an excellent path to financial freedom.

"After I went to college, I thought there were several paths to financial freedom: the first path is buying lottery tickets, the second is buying real estate, the third is joining a good company and getting stock options, and the fourth is starting a business." He Xiaopeng, chairman of XPeng Motors, mentioned in Luo Yonghao's podcast before.

For enterprises, this is undoubtedly a battle for talent.

The growth of an enterprise cannot be achieved without the support of people. Talents are the most valuable asset in this technological competition. Just like Changxin, its number of employees has grown from a few hundred to nearly 20,000 over the past ten years, among whom R&D personnel account for 6,259 people, accounting for as high as 32.43%. It is these people who changed the fate of the wasteland in Hefei.

Changxin Technology frankly stated in its prospectus, "There is still a certain gap between the company's process technology level and that of Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology. The product structure is in a state of continuous optimization, and the company's gross profit margin level is still lower than that of the top three international manufacturers." Catching up is never achieved overnight. Facing up to the gap makes the importance of retaining talents even more prominent.

The bell-ringing for listing is just a starting point, and they still have to fight a more difficult battle.

This article is from the WeChat official account "PE Daily" (ID: pedaily2012), author: Yang Jiyun, published with authorization from 36Kr.