On July 20, China's most valuable AI chip start-ups Cambricon Technologies went public on China's SSE Star Market, becoming the first AI chip stock in the A-share market.
Cambricon rose more than 350% after the opening, and was still up nearly 230% by the close of trading, with a share price of 212.40 yuan and a market capitalization of 85 billion yuan.
Data shows that from 2017 to 2019, Cambricon revenue was about 7.84 million yuan, 117 million yuan, and 444 million yuan, respectively, with an average compound annual growth rate of 652%.
Cambricon's 2018 year-over-year growth of over 1392% is quite impressive.
However, Cambricon's profitability is not good, showing a trend of increasing losses.
In the last three years, Cambricon lost 381 million yuan, 41 million yuan, and 1.179 billion yuan respectively, totaling more than 1.6 billion yuan in losses.
According to Cambricon, in addition to the impact of a large amount of share incentive payments, the main reason is the company's large research and development expenditure, and the product is still in the market expansion stage.
Cambricon expects to report a loss of 210 million to 230 million yuan in the first half of this year.
According to the prospectus, Cambricon's research and development expenses for the last three years were about 30 million yuan, 240 million yuan, and 543 million yuan, respectively, all of which exceeded the size of its annual revenue.
At the end of 2019, the company had 680 R&D staff, accounting for nearly 80% of the total.
However, the results of intensive R&D are quite fruitful. At present, Cambricon has developed three types of general-purpose smart chip products for three major scenarios: terminal, cloud, and edge.
