China’s Montage Technology soars in Hong Kong debut

Shares of Chinese chip designer Montage Technology surged about 60% in its Hong Kong trading debut on Monday following an initial share sale that raised $902 million.

The stock jumped to HK$171 after pricing its offering at HK$106.89, the upper end of the range. It was 52% higher in afternoon trading.

Founded in 2004, the Shanghai-based company specializes in developing high-performance semiconductors primarily for cloud computing, data centers and artificial intelligence applications.

Its Hong Kong public tranche was subscribed more than 700 times, while the international offering was nearly 38 times covered, signaling strong investor appetite for Chinese AI and semiconductor names.

Montage Technology is also listed on the mainland, with a market capitalization of around $27 billion, according to LSEG data.

The listing adds to a growing list of Chinese AI chip firms tapping capital markets in recent months, with GigaDevice Semiconductor and OmniVision Integrated Circuits debuting in January.

Other chip firms such as Biren Technology, MetaX, Moore Threads and Shanghai Iluvatar CoreX Semiconductor have also recently listed. 

The wave of IPOs comes as Beijing ramps up its self-sufficiency efforts in the advanced chip space and reduces reliance on American designers like Nvidia, which are prevented from selling its most advanced chips to China.

However, competition in the market is growing fierce, with Chinese tech giant Huawei and its chip unit HiSilicon holding a leading share of the domestic market.

Meanwhile, Nvidia could be set for a market bounce back after the Trump administration cleared the way for it to sell its H200 chip to China. While the H200 lags Nvidia’s most cutting-edge technologies, it is far more powerful than any AI chip previously sold in the Chinese market.

China, in late January, had approved a first batch of H200 imports for several domestic tech companies, including ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent and DeepSeek, according to a report from Reuters.

However, the report added that Beijing was only granting approvals under specific conditions, with the final rules still being finalized, according to anonymous sources.