Live from the Earnings Meeting: Investors’ Questions Only Partially Answered — Cambricon’s (Hanwǔjì 寒武纪) Results Meeting Leaves Three Big Mysteries

Cambricon earnings meeting made waves — but left investors with major unanswered questions about customers, sustainability, and technical moat.

Key Points

• Share Price: ¥1,420.99 RMB ($197.36 USD)
• Share Price Gain since end of 2023: 952.9%
• Market Capitalization: ¥594.5 billion RMB ($82.57 billion USD)
• Targeted Equity Issuance: Up to ¥3.985 billion RMB ($553.47 million USD)

Quick summary

On the afternoon of September 18, 2025, Cambricon (Hanwǔjì 寒武纪) held its 2025 half‑year earnings briefing.

Management emphasized a long‑term technical roadmap centered on compute for large models.

During the Q&A, investors’ dozens of questions received answers to only a minority of concerns.

The session left three major unresolved issues: who the company’s large customers really are, how sustainable the recent explosive revenue growth is, and how deep Cambricon’s technical moat is versus rivals such as NVIDIA (Yīngwěidá 英伟达) and Huawei Ascend (Huáwéi Shēngténg 华为昇腾).

What management emphasized

Throughout the briefing, Cambricon’s leadership kept the narrative on future technology and ecosystem development — especially around large models.

Board chairman Chen Tianshi (Chén Tiānshí 陈天石) described ongoing work on next‑generation high‑end training chips.

The work focuses on iterative optimizations to microarchitecture and instruction sets for scenarios including natural language processing, video/image generation and vertical large‑model training and inference.

The stated goal is to raise product competitiveness across the board.

Management also stressed software and ecosystem efforts.

Chen said the company has built an open developer community, offering online courses, documentation and code examples to accelerate developer onboarding.

Improved software tooling, he said, should make it easier to port existing models onto Cambricon hardware.

The ultimate aim is to provide an open end‑to‑end service stack from model development to deployment.

When asked about a sharp inventory increase in H1, company secretary Ye Haoyin (Yè Hàoyǐn 叶淏尹) explained management had proactively stocked cloud product lines in anticipation of strong compute demand from the large‑model market.

That decision was framed as preparing for sustained commercial revenue.

The three unresolved questions

1) Who is the real “big customer”?

Investors repeatedly asked which large customers are driving the company’s recent revenue surge and whether current products are in shortage.

Ye declined to name clients, saying only that in H1 the company’s products were deployed at scale across operators, finance, internet and other key industries.

She added that more detail appears in the company’s 2025 half‑year report.

Direct questions — including whether ByteDance (Bǐdòu 字节跳动) is the major customer circulating in market speculation — received no answer.

Historical disclosure is sparse.

Cambricon’s 2021 and 2022 annual reports named state‑backed intelligent computing centers in Kunshan, Jiangsu and Nanjing as top customers for those years.

But other years’ large‑customer identities haven’t been publicly revealed.

Why this matters

• Revenue concentration risk: Without named anchors, investors can’t judge whether growth is driven by a handful of large, repeat customers or a broader market adoption.
• Visibility for future revenue: Named customers enable better forecast modeling for absorption of inventory and demand sustainability.
• Contract structure unknowns: One‑time purchases vs. recurring cloud contracts imply very different revenue durability.

2) Can the earnings surge be sustained?

Cambricon reported dramatic H1 growth.

Operating revenue was ¥2.881 billion RMB ($400.14 million USD).

Net profit attributable to shareholders was ¥1.038 billion RMB ($144.17 million USD), marking its first half‑year profit.

The company reported year‑over‑year revenue growth of 4,347.82%.

Investors pressed management on confidence in maintaining current profitability.

Chen offered no firm forward profit guidance.

He reiterated a focus on continued technology innovation and market expansion to drive sustained healthy development.

Why this matters

• High growth but little visibility: Exceptional year‑over‑year growth needs corroborating evidence such as detailed customer lists and recurring contract terms.
• Inventory conversion is key: Management says inventory was stocked for cloud demand — the next quarters will show whether that inventory converts to recurring revenue.
• Fundraising ties to execution: The planned equity issuance will fund projects tied to large models — investors should expect milestones and timelines to justify the valuation.

3) How wide and deep is Cambricon’s technical moat?

Competition in the AI‑chip market is intense.

As China’s largest AI‑chip company by market cap on A‑share markets, Cambricon’s technical strength is a focal point for investors.

IDC data cited in market commentary show Cambricon shipped about 26,000 AI chips in 2024 (≈2.6万片), representing roughly 4% of the domestic AI‑chip market.

Those shipments sit behind Huawei Ascend (Huáwéi Shēngténg 华为昇腾) at about 640,000 chips (64万片) and Baidu Kunlun (Bǎidù 昆lún 百度昆仑) at about 69,000 chips (6.9万片).

When asked to comment on competitors’ product strategies and data, Chen reiterated Cambricon’s commitment to independent R&D and forward‑looking technology.

He did not provide detailed product‑by‑product technical comparisons or specific performance metrics versus peers like NVIDIA (Yīngwěidá 英伟达) or Huawei Ascend.

Why this matters

• Shipments vs. market cap mismatch: Ship volumes indicate a meaningful gap with leading rivals even as market valuation is high — investors need technical benchmarks to reconcile that.
• Benchmarking is essential: Third‑party performance evaluations would clarify the company’s positioning for both inference and training workloads at scale.
• Software stack and ecosystem: Competitive hardware is only part of the equation — developer tools, model portability and integration into cloud stacks influence adoption.

Fundraising and inventory posture

Cambricon is advancing a targeted equity issuance.

The company’s registration application to issue shares to specific investors has reportedly been approved by the China Securities Regulatory Commission.

Planned proceeds are not expected to exceed ¥3.985 billion RMB ($553.47 million USD).

The stated use of funds is primarily for chips and software platform projects aimed at large models.

Management attributed the inventory increase in H1 to deliberate stocking for cloud product lines to meet anticipated large‑model compute demand.

Investors will be watching whether those inventories convert into recurring, sustainable revenue.

Market reaction and valuation

On September 18, 2025 close, Cambricon’s share price stood at ¥1,420.99 RMB per share ($197.36 USD).

That marks a gain of 952.9% from the 2023 final trading‑day close of ¥134.96 RMB per share ($18.74 USD).

The company’s reported total market capitalization in the display data was about ¥594.5 billion RMB ($82.57 billion USD).

What to watch next

• Major customer disclosure: More detailed naming of large customers in upcoming filings or investor communications — that would reduce uncertainty about revenue sustainability.
• Quarterly shipment & order trends: Data showing whether inventory levels are being absorbed into revenue or building ahead of demand.
• Third‑party technical benchmarks: Independent evaluations that compare Cambricon’s chips and software stack to alternatives from NVIDIA, Huawei and Baidu.
• Use of proceeds & project timelines: Progress and timing on the use of proceeds from the targeted share issuance and whether planned projects begin to generate revenue.

Key names and terms (for clarity)

• Cambricon — pinyin: Hanwǔjì (寒武纪) — English: Cambricon
• Chen Tianshi — pinyin: Chén Tiānshí (陈天石) — board chairman, Cambricon
• Ye Haoyin — pinyin: Yè Hàoyǐn (叶淏尹) — company secretary, Cambricon
• NVIDIA — pinyin: Yīngwěidá (英伟达) — widely used English name: NVIDIA
• Huawei Ascend — pinyin: Huáwéi Shēngténg (华为昇腾) — English commonly: Huawei Ascend
• Baidu Kunlun — pinyin: Bǎidù Kūnlún (百度昆仑) — English commonly: Baidu Kunlun

Practical takeaways for investors, founders, and builders

• Investors: Demand clarity on customer concentration and contract types before extrapolating H1 growth into longer‑term forecasts.
• Founders and CTOs: Evaluate vendor selection based on not just advertised specs but also software portability and ecosystem support.
• Tech marketers: Highlight clear case studies and repeatable deployment stories when competing with larger incumbents that have opaque customer lists.

Linking opportunities

• Link investor‑focused pages to the company filing or earnings transcript when available.
• Link technical deep dives to Cambricon’s developer resources on its official site for credibility.
• Link market‑cap and quote mentions to real‑time quote pages (for example, the provided Eastmoney quote link in References).

References

• Investors’ Questions Only Partially Answered: Cambricon Earnings Meeting Leaves Three Major “Mysteries” – Eastmoney
• Cambricon Official Website – Cambricon (寒武纪)
• Cambricon (688256.SH) Quote – Eastmoney

Cambricon earnings meeting — keep watching for customer disclosure, shipment trends, and independent benchmarks to judge whether the current momentum is durable.