Capital & Markets

RUNTO (洛图科技), which tracks smart-glasses retail across JD.com, Tmall and Douyin, published July 2026 figures showing the category fall for the first time: 74,000 units, down 15.3 percent year on year, for 130 million yuan, down 25.8 percent, at an average price of 1,751 yuan, down 12.4 percent. RUNTO attributes the fall to the calendar, because June was the 618 shopping festival and last July was the second-highest month in thirteen. The composition underneath it is the part that is not seasonal. AR glasses, the ones with a display in the lens, sold 33,000 units for 98.28 million yuan, up 72.7 percent by volume and 70.0 percent by revenue, at an average price of 2,990 yuan that did not move all year. Audio-only glasses sold 13,000 units for 8.7 million yuan, down 33.5 percent by revenue at 656 yuan. Camera glasses, the no-display design Meta made familiar with Ray-Ban, sold 28,000 units for 23.1 million yuan, down 46.6 percent by volume and 77.9 percent by revenue, with the average price down 58.5 percent to 819 yuan. The three segments sum to 130.08 million yuan, matching the reported total, and the prior-year segments sum to 175.41 million, which returns the 25.8 percent decline to the digit, so the shift is not a rounding artefact. AR went from 33.0 percent of category revenue to 75.6 percent in twelve months while camera glasses went from 59.6 percent to 17.8 percent. The two leaderboards have come apart: the largest volume share in July, 17.0 percent, went to 清野, a cheap camera-glasses newcomer, while by revenue the order is Rokid, RayNeo, XREAL, Qwen and Huawei, with the top five taking 65.8 percent. Against that, Alibaba previewed a displayless pair called the Qwen N1 at the Bund Summit, with iris recognition at a claimed false-accept rate below one in a million and eye tracking meant to authorise payment by looking at a terminal. In the Briefing: Bank of China put at least 300 billion yuan behind the compute industry at the 2026 China Computing Power Conference, with China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, PICC, China Orient Asset Management and CDB Financial Leasing, targeting at least 100 intelligent computing centre projects and at least 3,000 compute-consuming firms across the 15th Five-Year Plan, while ICBC took its compute-token loan national; China Telecom’s research institute forecast ten quintillion tokens consumed this year rising to more than 3,500亿亿 by 2030, two endpoints its own stated compound rate does not fit, and put inference at 80 percent of China’s compute market by 2029 with 2026 AI capex at leading Chinese tech firms near 600 billion yuan; XPeng’s humanoid production line began operating and the first IRON walked off it under its own power, carrying 76 degrees of freedom and three Turing chips for a claimed 2,250 TOPS; and 25 Fields medallists including Terence Tao and Yu Deng signed a statement arguing that using mathematical problems as capability benchmarks damages the field.

硬氪, the hardware desk at 36Kr, walked through Beijing’s first humanoid-robot data training centre in Shijingshan and found a 3,000 square metre hall with the zone signs still hanging, the display stands still holding their plants, and the robots gone. It stopped seventeen months after it opened, and the third phase that was to run 108 robots across a thousand real tasks in 10,000 square metres was never built. The structure behind it is the story. A robot maker and a local government co-found a data-collection company, usually at a 1:9 or 2:8 split with the maker putting in the small share; the joint venture buys robot bodies, arms and supporting hardware from the maker; a third-party operator sells the data on to companies training models. So the manufacturer contributes one or two yuan in ten, books an order for all ten paid mostly with public money, and the buyer is a company it partly owns. 硬氪 reports more than a hundred such centres went up across 23 provinces in a year, that one robot company heading for a ChiNext listing had as much as 80 percent of its orders from the model, and that another valued above 20 billion yuan shipped 500 robots this year into data factories it had co-funded, against total expected shipments of 1,000 to 2,000. Figures from Interact Analysis cited in the piece put state-capital participation in these centres at 53.8 percent against 88.4 percent a year earlier, and an official at a provincial capital investment-promotion office told 硬氪 they had just turned down two data-collection proposals and that internally some of these projects look like a new kind of Ponzi scheme. The economics were thin even while the money flowed: an operator told 硬氪 that a collector wearing a rig for a full eight-hour shift yields roughly one hour of usable data once idling, out-of-spec motions and broken arms are subtracted, and collection has since gone bodiless to head-mounted egocentric video and UMI-style hand-worn grippers that need no robot present, yielding five to six usable hours out of eight at a crowdsourced rate that has fallen from 45 yuan an hour to 35. Real-robot data still matters, and a recent Tsinghua experiment found that stripping it out drops task success from 81 percent to 40 percent, but it is the seasoning now rather than the main ingredient. The listed-market version surfaced the same day: ASD, a Zhejiang cookware and small-appliance maker, filed an abnormal-fluctuation notice disclosing that its embodied-intelligence robot business has booked 137,200 yuan of sales to date, about 20,500 dollars, against 1.351 billion yuan of first-half revenue and a 93.4 million yuan net loss, and Sinovatio, filing after two straight limit-ups on AI-security enthusiasm, said its AI application products come to under 2 percent of first-half revenue.

DeepSeek posted about 150 openings on 8 September and not one of them is a research role, per a WeChat notice read closely by QbitAI and republished by 36Kr. They split into server-side development engineers across six directions, which are the large-model research platform, Agent framework components, R&D efficiency infrastructure, the DeepSeek API, online serving and data engineering, and agent elastic-compute engineers across two, platform development and low-level systems, with a target profile of senior backend people two to ten years in. QbitAI puts the whole company at 300 to 500 people, so a single round is worth somewhere between a quarter and a half of existing headcount, hired into one function; an investor at a front-line firm told Sina Tech the goal for this year is 1,000 people, which would put DeepSeek level with Zhipu, whose 2025 prospectus listed 883 employees. What the 150 are being hired to build has a name: DSec, for DeepSeek Elastic Compute, disclosed for the first time in the V4 technical report as three Rust components, an API gateway called Apiserver, an Edge agent on every host machine and a cluster monitor called Watcher, wired over a homemade RPC protocol on top of 3FS, the distributed filesystem DeepSeek open-sourced last year. Cui Tianyi, who runs the DeepSeek Harness team, gave the reason in one sentence: scale produces complexity, and the complexity turns around and demands more scale. Underneath it is the money. Reuters reported on 9 September that DeepSeek has hired CITIC Securities to prepare a listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market and aims to start the process this year, which TechNode carried the same morning; Sina’s wire adds that CITIC has made contact and entered due diligence, that the two sides have not signed a formal listing-tutoring agreement, and that DeepSeek has said nothing officially.

Enflame’s allocation result, filed to the exchange on 7 September, priced 43,035,173 new shares at 142.18 yuan and records the online retail tranche subscribed 6,109.34 times. That tripped the clawback rule, which moves 10 percent of the public offering out of the institutional book once retail demand passes 100 times, growing the retail tranche from 6,885,500 shares to 10,328,500 at a final allotment ratio of 0.02455315 percent. The offline book was barely cooler: 291 institutions across 11,272 placement accounts bid 72.795 billion shares against a tranche of about 27.5 million, or 2,642.99 times. Enflame has never made a profit, so listing rules bar it from quoting a price-to-earnings multiple and its own investment-risk notice prints price-to-sales instead, 55.62 times pre-issue and 61.80 post-issue, valuing the company at 61.187 billion yuan. The same notice’s peer table, dated 28 August, averages 93.51 times sales, so the deal was priced under its comparables on purpose. Moore Threads went the other way the same day: 25,774,510 shares, 5.48 percent of the company, came off a nine-month lockup and the stock closed limit-down at 415.49 yuan against Friday’s 519.35, taking 48.8 billion yuan off its market value, with institutions net sellers of 1.462 billion. Its free float roughly doubled, from 6.43 percent to 11.91 percent, and the unlock is the only input that moved. Enflame’s own day-one free float is 17,900,325 shares of 430,351,728, or 4.16 percent, with 88.09 percent still locked and Caixin reporting close to 40 percent of the share capital coming free on 7 December.

Cambricon (688256.SH) granted four million restricted shares to 944 of its own employees at 750 yuan apiece on 17 August, and the plan draft filed to the exchange states the coverage as 85.37 percent of the payroll. The same document sets the vesting schedule: at least 13.5 billion yuan of audited revenue in 2026, 40.5 billion cumulative across 2026 and 2027, and 100 billion cumulative across 2026 to 2028, with lower triggers of 10.8, 32.4 and 80 billion, where landing between trigger and target vests 80 percent of that year’s slice and falling below the trigger cancels it. Set against the company’s own audited accounts, which show 709 million yuan of revenue in 2023, 1.174 billion in 2024 and 6.497 billion in 2025, with 5.996 billion booked in the first half of 2026, the third rung implies 59.5 billion yuan in 2028 alone, about 9.2 times the 2025 figure. The instrument is a right to buy at 750 rather than a transfer of value: the stock closed at 1,072.00 yuan on 4 September, so the spread across the four million shares is about 1.29 billion yuan, and only if every rung clears. The plan’s own note four states that the performance targets do not constitute a forecast or a substantive commitment to investors.

Z.AI, the entity Zhipu lists under in Hong Kong at stock code 2513, filed interim results on 31 August 2026 covering the six months to 30 June. Revenue was 953.892 million yuan, up 399.7 percent, while gross margin fell from 50.0 percent to 26.4 percent. The move is mix rather than discounting: open-platform and API revenue was 825.176 million yuan, up 2,735.7 percent, and went from 15.2 percent of revenue to 86.5 percent, while on-premises deployment fell from 73.7 percent of 2025 revenue to 13.5 percent of this half. Token volume on the MaaS platform is up more than 40 times since the start of 2026 and the average API selling price rose about 101 percent over the same stretch, so volumes surged while prices went up. That leaves the 24.6 percent gross margin on the open-platform and API business a cost problem, not a pricing one.

Huawei filed its 2026 half-year report with the Beijing Financial Assets Exchange on 31 August, a disclosure it owes onshore bond buyers rather than shareholders. Revenue was 467.82 billion yuan, up 9.6 percent, and net profit attributable to the parent was 23.43 billion, down 36.8 percent. Net cash from operating activities was negative 39.89 billion yuan against a positive 31.18 billion a year earlier, a swing of 71.07 billion in a half when sales grew. Cash paid for goods and services rose 35 percent to 425.2 billion yuan, an increase of about 110.9 billion against revenue growth of about 40.8 billion, and inventory reached 277.5 billion yuan, up 45 percent from the end of 2025. Research and development took 121.38 billion yuan, 25.9 percent of revenue, which on its own accounts for the profit fall but not for the cash.

Unitree booked 50,013,826.62 yuan of net profit attributable to shareholders in the first quarter of 2026, against 95,602,511.45 yuan a year earlier, on 68.49 percent more revenue. The half-year headline runs the other way, a 274 million yuan profit against a 32 million yuan loss, but Chinese listing rules make a company print earnings both with and without non-recurring items, and the 0.67 against 0.75 yuan ratio puts underlying first-half profit down 19.34 percent while revenue grew 48.54 percent. The gap is a 349 million yuan share-based payment charge that hit the first half of 2025 and did not recur. Research spending went from 6.9 to 11.8 percent of revenue and selling expense from 6.0 to 14.2 percent.

Biren’s first interim report as a listed company showed 1.2355 billion yuan of half-year revenue, up 1,997.6 percent, with a net loss 76.4 percent narrower than a year earlier. The number that decides the story is the float. Moore Threads carries 250.94 billion yuan of market value on 6.43 percent of its shares actually trading, and MetaX 270.03 billion yuan on 4.63 percent. Two Shanghai listings hold 520.97 billion yuan of combined market value, about 77.4 billion dollars, priced each day by 28.6 billion yuan of tradable stock. Biren, listed in Hong Kong with just over half its shares in public hands, trades at about 71 times half-year revenue against Moore Threads at about 144.

Changxin Technology, the listed parent of CXMT, filed first-half revenue of 150.31 billion yuan, up 873.64 percent, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 77.605 billion yuan against a 2.332 billion yuan loss in the same half of 2025. Gross margin was 84.74 percent, against 13.00 percent a year earlier. The line that decides what it means is the cash flow statement: operating activities threw off 131.156 billion yuan of net cash while financing contributed 1.002 billion, so the company covered a 35.577 billion yuan investing programme nearly four times over out of what it sold. Across all of 2025 it had taken 46.121 billion yuan net from financing.

Profits at China’s large industrial enterprises rose 17.6 percent across January to July, and AI-related electronics accounted for 9.3 percentage points of that, more than half of all the profit growth Chinese industry produced this year. July on its own grew 11.2 percent, down 3.9 points from June, so the headline is decelerating while the electronics contribution holds. The same fact reads from the bottom up in the interim reports filed that morning: SMIC’s first-half net profit rose 94.2 percent on revenue up 19.4 percent, profit growing about five times faster than sales, with the extra coming from price rather than volume.

CXMT’s over-allotment option was exercised in full without the bookrunner spending any of it, because the stock never traded below its 8.66 yuan issue price during the window, taking the raise to 66.607 billion yuan gross, about 9.9 billion dollars. YMTC’s 33 billion yuan Shanghai application was accepted on 24 August, and Enflame set 2 September for subscription against a 6 billion yuan target. That is 105.6 billion yuan asked of China’s domestic equity market for DRAM, NAND and AI silicon inside roughly five weeks. CXMT’s first quarter of 2026 alone earned 24.76 billion yuan on 50.80 billion of revenue, at a 79.2 percent gross margin.

Unitree listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market on 19 August at 150.80 yuan a share and opened at 1,100. Four sessions later it closed at 602.80, taking about 200 billion yuan off the peak valuation. Only 7.44 percent of its shares were free to trade on listing day, and roughly 85 percent of that float changed hands in a single session. The mark matters most to companies with no ticker: eight domestic embodied-AI firms were valued at 20 billion yuan or more as of June, and those private marks were set against Unitree’s screen price. Its own filed half-year numbers are good, with revenue up 48.5 percent and a 274.0 million yuan profit against a loss.

The Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission published a 2026 to 2030 action plan for cyber-information enterprises on 21 August: seven actions and twenty-one measures. Measure 1 orders a continuously updated national database of these firms, with classification and grading standards sorting them into three named tiers. Measure 19 tells regulators to speed up domestic listing review and to open non-IPO exits through S-funds and M&A funds, and tells banks to treat patents, trademarks and data as credit-assessment inputs. Measure 16 orders administrative inspections regulated so as to minimise disruption to normal operations, and Measure 5 names high-end AI chips, high-performance training clusters, world models, agents and embodied intelligence.

A Guangzhou district launched Token贷, a Bank of China loan that underwrites AI companies on tokens burned rather than property owned, with lines to 30 million yuan on four non-property inputs. The trial tranche is about 28 million yuan, but CITIC Bank and Bank of Guangzhou have followed, and Beijing’s E-Town and Anhui have written token lending into policy. The National Data Administration puts national token consumption above 30 trillion a day as of end-June.

DeepSeek raised API prices by up to 12x, 83 days after calling its 75 percent V4-Pro discount permanent. Tencent Cloud matched the move rather than undercutting it, and the repricing ran industry-wide: Zhipu has raised prices three times this year and Kimi K3 output passed 100 yuan per million tokens. The stretch of the market where Chinese models competed purely on price is closing.

Unitree priced the year’s most anticipated hardware IPO at 150.80 yuan a share, a listing value near 61 billion yuan (about 8.5 billion dollars) and well above the 40 billion the market expected, with DeepSeek taking a strategic stake. That is about 103 times trailing profit for a company that shipped roughly 28,000 robots in 2025, most to research and education, so the price assumes it grows into 100,000 or more a year of paying industrial work.

Cambricon, the designer of China’s most advanced homegrown AI chips, reported it earned more in the first half of 2026 than in all of 2025: revenue of about 5.99 billion yuan (up 108 percent) and net profit of about 2.31 billion yuan (up 123 percent), against a full-year 2025 net profit near 2.06 billion yuan. Chinese buyers will take every accelerator it can design; how many China can actually manufacture, at what node and with whose memory, is the fabless ceiling that remains.

Zhongji Innolight, the world’s largest optical-transceiver maker and supplier of more than half of Nvidia’s optical modules, pulled off Hong Kong’s largest IPO in seven years at about 6.8 billion dollars, then fell 8 percent on debut as the AI-infrastructure trade repriced. The picks and shovels of the American AI boom, it turns out, ship from Suzhou.

China’s delivery robots crossed the cost line: Neolix says its per-vehicle cost fell more than half in two years to below 10,000 dollars, moving a parcel 25 to 35 percent cheaper than a human courier. The logistics industry projects 860,000 units a year by 2030, and the startup AIROBO closed the field’s largest first round the same week a Shenzhen circuit-board and chip-design platform, JLC, opened more than 170 percent above its offer price.

A four-month-old robot startup, PokeBot, raised close to 100 million dollars, but the more telling money went a layer up the supply chain to the data sellers. Training a general-purpose robot brain needs an estimated 10 million hours of interaction data against a supply near 500,000, and LightWheel became what Chinese coverage calls the world’s first embodied-data unicorn.

CXMT opened its Shanghai debut up 471 percent and reached about 500 billion dollars by midday, passing ICBC to become the most valuable company on China’s mainland exchanges, the first semiconductor to top the A-share market in its 35-year history.

Nine and a half million retail households piled into CXMT’s STAR Market IPO at a record 0.4714 percent win-rate, and DeepSeek’s Liang Wenfeng took the single largest private-fund allocation in China’s biggest chip listing since SMIC.

DeepSeek closed its first outside round, roughly 7.4 billion dollars at a 50-billion-plus valuation. The founder wrote the biggest check; the only investor with a vote is a state fund.

Cambricon became China’s first pure-play AI chip designer worth over a trillion yuan. The same report shows the distance left: a 2.9% share of the cards China bought in 2025, against Nvidia’s 55%.

A product-less humanoid startup hit a billion-dollar valuation, built by Huawei’s former self-driving lead. China’s autonomous-driving talent is transplanting into robots.