Semiconductor Memory
Riding the tailwind of the super memory cycle, the latest semi-annual reports released by domestic memory manufacturers point in divergent directions.
Previously, four listed companies—GigaDevice, PuYa Semiconductor, Longsys, and Netac—have sequentially released their 2026 semi-annual reports [Related Reading].
Recently, with the release of the semi-annual reports from three more memory manufacturers—Biwin Storage, DapuStor, and Dosilicon—the data for key players in the domestic memory sector has been fully disclosed. This provides a more comprehensive perspective for an overall analysis of this super memory cycle.
Who is truly making money? Who is heavily investing in R&D? Who is focusing on technology? What are the future strategic plans? Clues to all these questions can be found in their respective financial reports.
01. Who is Making the Real Money? Design Houses Capture Premiums, Module Houses Compete on Product Structure
In the first half of 2026, the overall demand in the memory industry recovered, driving a general restorative growth in revenue and profit for companies in the sector. However, a horizontal comparison of the seven manufacturers reveals significant differences in earnings quality among companies with different business models.
In terms of revenue scale, Longsys firmly holds the top position. In the first half of the year, it achieved an operating revenue of RMB 24.088 billion, a year-on-year growth rate of 136.26%, and its net profit attributable to shareholders increased to RMB 10.577 billion, hitting a historic high and continuing to serve as the volume anchor for the sector. Biwin Storage ranked second with a revenue of RMB 15.575 billion, a year-on-year increase of 298.10%; its high growth elasticity mainly benefited from the surge in orders for edge AI hardware (such as smart wearable devices). Relying on its asset-light Fabless model, GigaDevice also crossed the RMB 10 billion threshold, reaching a revenue of RMB 11.566 billion.
But is looking at revenue alone enough? Obviously not. Gross profit margin is also a crucial window for observation.
Chip design houses have demonstrated exceptional price elasticity and premium space in this upcycle. Dosilicon is a typical case. Although its operating revenue of RMB 1.497 billion is relatively small, its overall gross profit margin reached 67.66%, ranking first among the seven manufacturers. Because its self-developed planar SLC NAND Flash and NOR Flash products possess completely independent intellectual property rights, in the macro environment where overseas memory giants are fading out of the niche market and capacity supply is constrained, design houses have gained extremely high profit dividends through price transmission. The net profit attributable to shareholders turned losses into profits, recording RMB 659 million. GigaDevice also benefited from this, with its gross profit margin rising to 63.13% and achieving a net profit attributable to shareholders of RMB 6.857 billion. PuYa Semiconductor's overall gross profit margin also surged to 51.15%.
What about the integrated module and packaging/testing manufacturers? Their main strategy is to optimize product structure and extend the industrial chain to hedge against the high cost of wafer raw materials.
Longsys is a key variable. Its overall gross profit margin in the first half of the year was pulled up to 58.90%, approaching that of some chip design houses. This indicates that its self-developed controllers, advanced packaging and testing, coupled with the dual-brand premium of Lexar and FORESEE, are beginning to play a genuine financial support role.
Looking at Biwin Storage, its gross profit margin of 54.81% is also at a historic high. Biwin's explosion is largely because it bet correctly on high-end edge AI hardware such as Meta's AR glasses and Google smartwatches. The massive release of edge intelligent storage demand in the first half of the year directly optimized its overall product structure.
As for DapuStor, its overall gross profit margin of 34.90% seems relatively low among the seven. However, this belongs to the industrial structural characteristics of the enterprise SSD track. High-performance SSDs need to integrate a large number of very expensive data center-grade flash memory chips, and the cost of buying these chips pulls down the overall gross profit margin. Nevertheless, relying on the premium of its self-developed controllers and firmware among high-end cloud service providers, DapuStor still steadily secured a net profit attributable to shareholders of RMB 1.334 billion, successfully turning losses into profits.
02. Hard Metrics of R&D Expenses: Who is Spending the Real Money and Who is Tackling Core Technologies
Industry prosperity can mask many problems; it is only when the cycle declines that the R&D investments of each company will truly widen the gap.
We also pulled out the R&D investments of these seven companies for comparison:
Longsys's R&D investment in the first half of the year reached RMB 851 million, a significant year-on-year increase, ranking first in the sector in terms of R&D scale. The company's R&D focus is no longer limited to traditional module businesses, but focuses on tackling underlying core technologies such as self-developed controller chips and SPU memory processor chips, dedicated to breaking the storage performance bottleneck of AI terminal devices and improving the technology layout of the entire industrial chain.
Biwin Storage focuses on the integrated development path of "chip self-development + advanced packaging and testing". Currently, the company's self-developed eMMC controller chip has achieved large-scale mass production, and the UFS 3.1 controller chip has completed tape-out verification and will be gradually introduced into the terminal market. By continuously supplementing its self-developed controller capabilities along with advanced packaging and testing capacity construction, the industrial chain added value of the company's products is steadily increasing.
DapuStor is deeply engaged in the enterprise-grade large-capacity SSD track. Addressing the pain points of data storage and reading in AI computing scenarios, it has launched a 122TB QLC ultra-large-capacity commercial SSD product, and the 245TB large-capacity product has also completed R&D and entered the testing phase. Among domestic peers, this large-capacity product layout is at the forefront of the industry. The actual efficiency and market penetration rate after product deployment still require subsequent verification through batch customer adoption.
Dosilicon focuses on deep technological cultivation in the niche memory track. Its self-developed 1xnm planar SLC NAND Flash products feature high endurance and high stability, making them suitable for harsh application scenarios such as automotive and industrial control. Meanwhile, the company continues to layout in frontier fields such as Wi-Fi 7 and GPU integration, continuously expanding its business boundaries.
03. Some Hidden Trump Cards in the Financial Report Notes
Some very interesting details are hidden between the lines of each company's financial report.
Biwin Storage's supply chain guarantee measures are quite prominent. The financial report disclosed that to cope with the risk of tight supply of core wafers, Biwin Storage signed long-term strategic procurement agreements with major global flash memory chip suppliers, among which "the committed procurement amount corresponding to enterprise-grade flash memory chips is USD 1.8608 billion". In the industry shortage cycle, holding this long-term agreement is the key confidence for ensuring continuous and stable delivery to enterprise customers and major terminal mobile phone brand customers. In terms of capacity construction, the investment progress of its wafer-level advanced packaging and testing manufacturing project has reached 99.88%, entering the final sprint stage of mass production and production line debugging. After mass production at the end of the year, it will go all out to tackle ultra-thin LPDDR (FOMS-R process) and CMC compute-in-memory chiplets.
PuYa Semiconductor, on the other hand, demonstrates the reshaping role of capital operations on product lines and market position. Through the acquisition of SkyHigh Memory (SHM), PuYa Semiconductor directly stepped into the ranks of the world's third-largest SLC NAND Flash supplier in the first half of the year. SHM has a deep foundation in the automotive and industrial 2D NAND fields. After being consolidated into the financial statements, it directly contributed RMB 2.346 billion in operating revenue and RMB 100 million in net profit to PuYa Semiconductor in the first half of the year. Through this, PuYa completed the leap from a single NOR Flash manufacturer to a large-scale platform-based chip company.
DapuStor presents a relatively clear internationalized business profile. Out of the company's total operating revenue of RMB 4.722 billion in the first half of the year, overseas revenue reached RMB 2.706 billion, accounting for 57.30%. Its high-performance PCIe Gen5 enterprise SSDs have not only achieved large-scale shipments to major domestic customers but have also been delivered in batches to global leading cloud service providers such as Google, and shipped in batches to the large model newcomer DeepSeek, achieving deep penetration of domestic technological R&D into the international mainstream computing infrastructure supply chain.
Dosilicon's automotive-grade products are also making key progress. Its self-developed product lines, including SLC NAND Flash, NOR Flash, and MCP, have passed the stringent AEC-Q100 verification. Multiple automotive-grade models have completed mass production and delivery, and the company is actively promoting the "whitelist introduction" by OEMs and in-depth cooperation with Tier 1 manufacturers at home and abroad. Although the company's invested GPU business and self-developed Wi-Fi 7 wireless communication chip projects have not yet achieved profitability, forming a certain diversion and pressure on the consolidated profit, the strong cash-generating ability released by the main memory business still provides it with sufficient risk resistance and fault tolerance space.
The 2026 semi-annual reports submitted by domestic memory manufacturers have a solid underlying tone. After surviving the long industry winter, companies have gradually built their own risk-resistance moats through self-developed controllers, locking in key capacity via long-term agreements, and integrating advanced packaging and testing.
Standing at the node of technological evolution, AI is not only reconstructing the BOM cost of edge hardware through controller algorithms and "hot and cold data collaboration", but also pushing the competition into the deep water of vertical integration of "high-performance memory + advanced packaging" under the trends of high computing power, compute-in-memory packaging (Chiplet), and high-speed optical electronic co-packaging (OEC).
This is no longer just a routine competition of capacity scale, but a crucial battle for strategic positioning in the core ecological niche of the future domestic semiconductor industry. Relying on solid data and core technological breakthroughs, domestic memory manufacturers are steadily walking on their own growth track.
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