February 8, 2026
EQS via SeaPRwire.com / 09/02/2026 / 11:25 UTC+8 Preface: When AI moves from the cloud to the physical world, who can undertake the complexity of the real world? In this wave of AI investment, capital markets have focused heavily on the upstream computing power, foundational models, and application layers. This logic is clear and highly flexible, but precisely because of this, competition has quickly become fierce. In contrast, the capabilities required for integrating, manufacturing, and mass-delivering complex hardware systems during AI's transition from "cloud-based capabilities" to the "real world" have been underestimated. However, a clear trend is emerging: AI capabilities are beginning to migrate from the cloud to local devices. Although brand manufacturers are still in the exploration phase, AI PCs, AI smartphones, AI glasses, and embodied intelligent devices are accelerating their launch, with some products gradually entering the market introduction stage. Historical experience has repeatedly shown that when product forms mature and scale begins to expand, complex manufacturing and system integration capabilities will ultimately concentrate in the ODM ecosystem. Rather than betting on the outbreak of a single terminal, it is better to focus on terminal platform companies that can repeatedly deliver complex AI hardware in various forms. Against this backdrop, reviewing Huaqin Technology (SHA: 603296)'s development path is quite representative. Recently, Huaqin Technology announced that it is undertaking work in relation to the proposed issue of overseas listed foreign shares (H Shares) and its listing on the Main Board of The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited (HKEX). The Listing Committee of HKEX held a listing hearing on 5 February 2026 to consider the company’s application for the proposed offering and listing. The joint sponsors for the transaction received a letter from HKEX on 6 February 2026, which states that the Listing Committee has reviewed the company’s listing application. However, such letter does not constitute formal listing approval, and HKEX reserves the right to provide further comments on the company’s listing application. I. Starting from Smartphones: How Huaqin Evolved into an AI Hardware Platform with Multi-Terminal Layout AI is an unprecedented technological wave, but it is not without historical references. As described in the classic tech history book "On Top of Tides", science and technology are the main driving forces for social progress in our era. Technological revolutions have created winners standing at the crest of the wave and buried losers who cannot keep up. Looking back at Huaqin Technology's development trajectory, a recurring feature emerges: it has built capabilities before almost every round of industrial upgrading and become the recipient of demand when the industry truly scales up, riding the crest of multiple technological revolutions. Founded in 2005 by a team of founders with backgrounds from Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University, the company initially entered the market through smartphone motherboard design (IDH), providing R&D support for the rapidly rising domestic smartphone brands. Around 2010, as the wave of smartphone upgrades emerged, Huaqin Technology judged that pure design services could no longer meet brand customers' dual demands for efficiency and cost. It then extended downstream, building end-to-end capabilities from R&D and design, procurement and operations to manufacturing, completing the transformation to full-device ODM. This transformation made it the global leader in smartphone ODM shipments for the first time in 2011, and it has maintained a leading position in the industry for many years since then. But more importantly than the "number one" position is that the smartphone business itself has greatly tempered Huaqin's systematic capabilities Smartphones were already one of the most complex systems in consumer electronics at that time: involving radio frequency, heat dissipation, stacking, imaging, OS/driver adaptation, supply chain collaboration, and a manufacturing rhythm with extremely strict requirements for yield rate and ramp-up speed. For ODMs, what the smartphone business truly precipitated was not orders, but R&D-oriented full-device engineering capabilities, cross-supply chain organizational capabilities, and a systematic methodology from R&D to mass production. This systematic methodology is summarized by Huaqin Technology itself as the ODMM four quadrants: Efficient Operations, R&D and Design, Advanced Manufacturing, and Precision Structural Components. These four capabilities are interlocked to form a closed loop. On the R&D side, the company has formed a "1+5+5" global layout, with nearly 19,000 R&D and technical personnel; its R&D expenditure in 2024 reached 5.156 billion yuan. On the manufacturing side, the company has established a global manufacturing network of "China + VMI" (five locations in China + Vietnam, Mexico, India), with synchronous layouts at home and abroad to support the global delivery of multi-product and multi-customer orders. In addition, Huaqin Technology's customer service has long surpassed the traditional meaning of "after-sales service," evolving into an "end-to-end" one-stop service capability covering product definition, R&D and design, manufacturing, and operation and maintenance. This "end-to-end" service model has greatly reduced the complexity of supply chain management for brand customers and shortened the product launch cycle. When dealing with top-tier customers such as CSPs (Cloud Service Providers), Huaqin's service model has been further upgraded to close collaboration and Joint Design and Manufacturing (JDM). This is one of the core advantages that enabled the company to stand out in the highly demanding CSP market. Notably, software capabilities are becoming an important differentiator between Huaqin Technology and traditional manufacturing-oriented ODMs. Positioned as an "intelligent product platform enterprise," it is a hardware company with strong software capabilities. This difference stems from the software background of its founding team and long-term continuous investment in software, algorithms, and systems. Huaqin Technology's founding team has a strong software background (Qiu Wensheng, Cui Guopeng, and CTO Wu Zhenhai are all software engineers by training, while Chen Xiaorong is a hardware engineer), which has injected a software gene into the company. In addition, the company has continued to invest in software capabilities, with layouts in AI software, visual recognition, and other fields. In the era of edge AI, as local inference, multi-sensor fusion, and multimodal interaction gradually become the norm, software and systems engineering will directly affect the capability boundaries of hardware products Once system integration capabilities and platform capabilities are established, they have the ability to spill over to more complex hardware. From the system integration of laptops, the multi-category collaboration of tablets and wearables, the reliability and delivery rhythm requirements of data center equipment, to the software-hardware collaboration and safety redundancy standards of automotive electronics and robots, these are not as simple as "contract manufacturing for another category." For example, tablets require larger screen interaction and battery life optimization, laptops involve more complex x86/ARM multi-architecture adaptation, and smart wearables demand extreme miniaturization and low-power design. To meet the needs of different categories, Huaqin has standardized core modules through a platform-based technology middle office, enabling efficient cross-category R&D and delivery. According to a report by CIC Consulting, Huaqin leads the world in multiple categories. By cumulative smartphone ODM shipments from 2020 to 2024, Huaqin ranks first globally; by ODM shipments in 2024, the company also ranks first globally in tablets and smart wearables; in the laptop sector, by shipments in 2024, Huaqin has become the fourth-largest laptop ODM globally and the largest in Chinese Mainland. These data indicate that Huaqin Technology has taken a central position in the multi-terminal delivery system. Huaqin has a vision of "making hardware accessible to all," and its platform-based capabilities are the cornerstone of this vision. Such capabilities are crucial in the AI era, because AI will not be confined to a single terminal form but will reshape the entire hardware industry chain through the parallel development of multiple terminals, possibly in unexpected directions. Huaqin Technology's evolution history resembles a textbook on pre-positioning for each round of technological revolution. As AI hardware demand explodes, the company may be on the verge of a new growth phase. II. When Capabilities Meet a New Technological Cycle: The Realization Path of AI Increment at Huaqin Technology After confirming that Huaqin already possesses the underlying capabilities for multi-terminal expansion, a more critical question arises: Have these capabilities been translated into sustainable business growth in this new AI technological wave, and how will they continue to do so? Huaqin's strong scalability, driven by its system integration capabilities, is even more important in complex fields such as servers and automotive electronics. According to public information, the company's implemented "3+N+3" strategy takes smartphones, laptops, and servers as the three core pillars, expands into N types of ecological products such as smart life and commercial digital productivity, and lays out three innovative directions: automotive electronics, software, and robots. The increments brought by AI are being gradually realized across Huaqin's "3+N+3" business landscape, following a path from B-end to C-end and from computing power infrastructure to intelligent terminals. Among these, the first to reflect AI-related increments are not conceptual consumer-facing products, but businesses related to data centers and computing power infrastructure. As early as 2017, before the industry boom, Huaqin Technology strategically entered the data center business. Through continuous R&D investment and technical accumulation, it has built a complete layout covering AI servers, general-purpose servers, storage servers, and data center switches. More notably, Huaqin Technology is one of the few ODM manufacturers with both server and switch technical capabilities. Its products are compatible with mainstream GPU/CPU platforms and support high-speed, high-bandwidth, and low-latency networking, which is a distinct advantage amid the continuous expansion of AI computing power clusters. As AI training and inference demand drive the rapid growth of the computing power market, this business is accelerating its entry into the harvest period. According to Huaqin Technology's external communication disclosure in 2025: the revenue of the data business in 2025 exceeded 40 billion yuan, achieving nearly doubled growth overall, of which AI servers accounted for over 70%, and switch operating income achieved multiple growth year-on-year, exceeding 2.5 billion yuan. Unlike consumer electronics, the data center and server business has higher requirements for system reliability, delivery stability, and long-term collaboration capabilities, with greater customer switching costs. Once entering the core supply system, the business often exhibits stronger sustainability. From a capital market perspective, such businesses are not known for "short-term outbreaks" but are more conducive to extending the company's overall growth cycle, freeing it from being dominated by the fluctuations of a single consumer electronics industry. At the same time, consumer electronics, driven by the AI wave, has become an evolving core business. The integration of AI has driven an overall improvement in product structure, per-unit value, and R&D complexity. Taking AI PCs as an example, they impose higher requirements on overall device heat dissipation, power management, software-hardware collaboration, and supply chain rhythm. These capabilities are derived from long-term accumulation. As early as 2015, Huaqin Technology entered the laptop ODM market, breaking the monopoly of Taiwanese manufacturers in this field. By 2024, the company's laptop shipments exceeded 15 million units, and it successfully entered the supply chain of HP, the world's second-largest PC brand. According to Gartner and Canalys, the penetration rate of AI PCs is rising rapidly, expected to exceed 100 million units in 2025 with a penetration rate of nearly 40%; by 2028, shipments will reach 200 million units, with a compound annual growth rate of over 40% from 2024 to 2028. In the field of emerging businesses, Huaqin's layout is also worthy of attention. In automotive electronics, the company has built full-stack product capabilities covering four major areas: intelligent cockpits, intelligent connectivity, intelligent vehicle control, and autonomous driving, and has reached multiple cooperation agreements with domestic automakers. Among them, in the intelligent cockpit field, Huaqin has completed full product coverage from entry-level to flagship models, with complete full-stack development and mass production experience from hardware underlying layers, software middleware to upper-layer HMI design. It has launched mid-range ADAS solutions based on Horizon Journey 6 series and high-end ADAS solutions based on NVIDIA Thor platform. In 2025, the automotive electronics business has achieved large-scale mass production, becoming a new growth highlight Multiple securities firms predict that global new energy vehicle sales will maintain high prosperity in 2026, with sales expected to reach a record high, driving high growth in industry chain demand. In addition, as the trend of autonomous driving popularization accelerates, policy incentives are implemented, and mapless NOA technology matures, high-end autonomous driving is rapidly penetrating the mass market. Although the current scale of the automotive electronics business is still relatively small compared to the company's overall revenue, it is expected to expand rapidly in line with industry trends. In the robot track, Huaqin aims to become a leading supplier of full-stack robot solutions in the 3C manufacturing field. The company has established a robot technology R&D team, leveraging its integrated advantages in CPU, GPU, sensors, and multimodal interaction technologies to explore humanoid robot R&D, and using its rich industrial scenarios to provide data support for product iteration. It is reported that in response to the needs of industrial manufacturing scenarios, the company is developing wheeled robots suitable for flexible manufacturing, which are expected to be delivered by the middle of this year; in the field of humanoid robots, the company completed the first-generation debugging of its self-developed biped humanoid robot in 2025, is planning the second-generation biped humanoid robot, and is conducting technical and business exchanges with multiple overseas leaders to actively explore cooperation opportunities; in the field of data collection robots, the company efficiently completed the development and delivery of data collection robots for a large model company in 2025. Although the current scale of these businesses is small, they are consistent with the company's existing software-hardware collaboration and complex system integration capabilities, providing more options for the future. Overall, Huaqin's growth in the AI cycle does not stem from the "re-outbreak" of a single terminal, but from leveraging platform-based capabilities to sequentially undertake demand across multiple business lines, forming a sustainable growth driver. This realization path is more akin to an industrial opportunity captor rather than a single-category manufacturer. III. When AI Extends the Cycle: How Capital Markets Re-price Huaqin Huaqin Technology's achievements in this round of AI are clearly reflected in its financial data. In the first three quarters of 2025, the company's cumulative revenue reached 128.88 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 69.6%; the net profit attributable to shareholders was 3.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 51.2%. The company recently issued an announcement, expecting its 2025 annual operating income to be approximately 170 billion yuan to 171.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 54.7% to 56.1%; the expected net profit attributable to shareholders is approximately 4 billion yuan to 4.05 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 36.7% to 38.4%. A more important indicator is the transformation of revenue structure: by product category, the proportion of high-performance computing business revenue in Huaqin Technology's total revenue rose to 60% in the first half of 2025, becoming the company's largest source of income. Among them, the core data center business contributed significantly, with Sinolink Securities Research Institute predicting that the revenue scale will exceed 40 billion yuan in 2025. Chart: Huaqin Technology's Business Structure in H1 2025, with High-Performance Computing Accounting for 60% Driven by AI, global computing power demand continues to expand. Data center construction, computing power upgrades, and network architecture evolution are becoming highly certain directions in hardware demand. From a more macro perspective, data from China Insights Consultancy (CIC) shows that the global data infrastructure market size has grown from 855.43 billion yuan in 2020 to 2.14224 trillion yuan in 2024, and is expected to increase to 4.99881 trillion yuan by 2030. Among them, the market size of AI servers reached 754.81 billion yuan in 2024, accounting for over 30% of the total, making it the primary growth engine. In addition, as the penetration rate of AI at the edge accelerates, Huaqin Technology's growth path presents a multi-level driven pattern. The intelligent terminal business will continue to support stable growth of the core business through acquisitions and integration, as well as the continuous increase in ODM industry penetration rate. Long-term momentum will come from innovative businesses such as automotive electronics and robots, which will gradually contribute increments. In the current capital market, Huaqin's valuation still has room for revaluation. Based on the A-share closing price as of February 3rd, Huaqin Technology's expected PE ratio for 2025 is approximately 20.7 times, lower than comparable companies such as Luxshare Precision and Everwin Precision. The latter clearly shows that AI-related hardware companies have begun to enjoy a higher valuation hub. In the current capital market, Huaqin's valuation level is not caused by a single factor, but more like the superposition of multiple cognitive inertia. On the one hand, the market still tends to regard it as a leading ODM in the smartphone industry chain, believing that its performance is highly dependent on the consumer electronics cycle; on the other hand, when the company's business continues to extend to PCs, servers, and more new fields, it is easily simply interpreted as "diversified expansion," thereby triggering doubts about business focus and synergy efficiency. However, by tracing Huaqin's own development path, it is found that this understanding is not entirely accurate. From smartphones to PCs and then to servers, each business expansion of the company is not a horizontal expansion, but a progression along the direction of increasing system complexity: more complex product forms, higher requirements for engineering collaboration, deeper customer relationships, and corresponding expansion of market space and value. This expansion logic is essentially a migration and reuse of capabilities, rather than a simple addition of categories. This "complexity-driven growth path" is not without precedent in the capital market. In its early stage, Fosun International long remained in a low valuation range due to its wide business distribution and weak correlation between sectors; but over time, the market gradually realized that its core competitiveness lies not in a specific asset, but in the ability to continuously discover and seize industrial opportunities, and the valuation logic then changed accordingly. Fosun's revaluation did not stem from the outbreak of a single business, but from the re-pricing of its "opportunity capture capability." The same logic applies to Huaqin Technology. The core issue facing Huaqin Technology today is not "whether it has AI concepts," but that the capital market's valuation model is still stuck in the past narrative of "consumer electronics manufacturing." This expectation gap between fundamentals and market pricing may constitute the potential for revaluation in the capital market. 09/02/2026 Dissemination of a Financial Press Release, transmitted by EQS News.The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.Media archive at www.todayir.com
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