Kioxia becomes the most valuable company in Japan

Last Friday Kioxia’s market cap hit $275 billion pushing it past Toyota to become the No.1 publicly quoted Japanese company.

In May, Kioxia forecast a $5.5 billion Q2 profit – a 48x jump  y-o-y.  For its FY to the end of March Kioxia had revenue up 37% y-o-y at $14.5 billion for a net profit of $3.5 billion– double last year’s – and an operating profit up 92.7% to $5.2 billion.

Kioxia’s NAND business has soared on the back of the huge demand for enterprise-grade, high-capacity SSDs used for the massive datasets used in AI processing, while NAND rivals Samsung, Micron and Hynix have shifted production lines away from NAND to HBM.

Kioxia started when Toshiba spun off its semiconductor memory division in 2017. In 2018,  a Bain Capital-led consortium that included South Korean competitor SK Hynix paid $18 billion for  56% of Toshiba Memory which was renamed Kioxia.

A number of  attempts to IPO  and various  merger plans with Western Digital foundered before Kioxia listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2024 gaining a market cap of  $6.4 billion.

Now Bain controls 36% of Kioxia stock, Toshiba has 27%, Hynix has 14% and Goldman Sachs has 4%.