China's CXMT hired 27 Samsung and SK hynix engineers at up to double pay; 26 are already gone
A National Assembly audit found China's CXMT hired 27 Samsung and SK hynix veterans at up to double pay, then lost 26 of them after 2.9 years on average. It landed 16 days after CXMT's fifth-generation DRAM entered mass production, beside a $5.2 billion expansion pointing to 500,000 wafers a month by 2028.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
The offer, then the exit
The packages were blunt: 60% to double the old salary, three to five years of guaranteed work, housing and the children's schooling covered 1. Twenty-seven Samsung and SK hynix engineers took them, carrying 415.9 combined years at the two companies into ChangXin Memory Technologies, China's biggest DRAM producer 17. Six had run mass production for more than 20 years 1. Twenty-six of the 27 are already gone, after 2.9 years at CXMT on average 13.
At stake is the premise behind this year's memory prices: that CXMT stays generations behind Samsung, SK hynix and Micron 58. Choi Soo-jin, the People Power Party lawmaker whose office ran the LinkedIn audit disclosed on October 6, reads the pattern as extraction: Korean know-how carried CXMT through factory build-out and process stabilization, and then the contracts ended 12.
A whole fab, hired by role
The audit counted production people, not researchers: eight in circuit design and layout, seven in process integration, four each in unit-process equipment and yield analysis, two in advanced packaging, the wafer-level and TSV work HBM stacks are built on, one in fab planning and one in process support 23. The office calls the recruitment turn-key: the 27 alone covered what a fab needs to run 2. Three of the five key technical people CXMT itself names in public materials are ex-Samsung and ex-Micron 2.
The 27 hires spanned every role a DRAM fab needs, design to packaging
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Circuit design & layout | 8 |
| Process integration | 7 |
| Unit process & equipment | 4 |
| Yield & defect analysis | 4 |
| Advanced packaging | 2 |
| Fab planning | 1 |
| Process support | 1 |
What the transfer finished
Sixteen days before the disclosure, CXMT's fifth-generation DRAM platform entered mass production, with two 24-gigabit LPDDR5X products shipping 45. Eight days after that came a 34.9 billion yuan ($5.2 billion) stock filing: 24.1 billion yuan for research and development, about 93% of it equipment, and 10.8 billion for in-house wafer testing 67. Morgan Stanley puts CXMT at 180,000 wafers a month at the end of 2025 and 500,000 by 2028 67. No document names the 27 on the G5 platform; the audit ties their stay to the build-and-stabilize years 1.
Detours around the non-competes
Only nine of the 27 joined CXMT directly within six months of leaving Samsung or SK hynix 2. Fifteen passed first through equipment partners, third-country firms or university research posts, routes the audit suspects were built to defeat Korean non-compete clauses 12. Seven of the departed resurfaced at Huawei's Hong Kong research institute, SMIC, HiSilicon or Chengdu Gaozhen; six returned to Korean companies; two landed in the United States 23.
Seoul shrugs, the market cannot
The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy says there is no legal basis to restrict legitimate overseas recruitment 13. Choi answers that the technology "is not just about design but also the experience and know-how accumulated over 20 or 30 years," and wants a state system tracking where core talent lands 3.
The bull case leans on Futurum's Rolf Bulk, who puts CXMT two to three generations behind the incumbents 8, and on a shortage where TrendForce counted a 59.5% sequential jump in second-quarter DRAM revenue and a 32GB DDR5 kit climbed from $150 to $550 5. The 2.9-year ledger is the other side of that gap.
What to watch
The 34.9 billion yuan plan still needs a shareholder vote 7, and the number that decides the trade is the crawl from 180,000 toward 500,000 wafers a month. The scarcity trade prices a technology gap; the audit counted a moving van.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
